paved with good intentions

One of the crack commandos of PWGI Corps, Eric “Z” Rodriguez, is a zealous student of the rules of the road, and remains the resident expert on traffic law. After much prodding (both metaphorical and physical) in the past, he still asseverates that turning left is permissible so long as there is a break in the double yellow line in the center of the road. We must, therefore, take his word as writ and admit that this practice is legal.

But there's a lot of people hanging a louie that really shouldn't, at least under the circumstances. To wit: Los Angeles has recently been racked by storms so severe that they made the national news from New York to Wichita, whose cost in human life is only now beginning to become clear as work crews clear away the mud. The storms have wrought great havoc on the essential Los Angeles network of roads and freeways, tearing up chunks of asphalt the size of small meteorites and shutting down many a critical artery. Particularly at risk are roads abutting hillsides, where the “Slide Area” signs often go unheeded and unnoticed but are now illustrating those dangers most vididly.

Prominent among these is Sunset Boulevard, which wends from downtown to the ocean, following the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains that bisect the city transversely for most of its route. Because of its path along tall muddy slopes, one or both lanes of traffic on the northward side are closed intermittenly along its length. Traffic along its eleven-mile length from Beverly Hills to the Pacific Ocean is, to put it mildly, slow.

The situation would only be reminiscent of the flow of mollases (rather than glass, which is, as a chemistry student might tell you, actually a fluid, though probably not a liquid) were it not for the presently piggish desire of drivers to turn left. Sunset is a street on which signals are relatively few and far between, and has no stop signs, so traffic proceeds near constantly. Moreover, because of the narrowness of the grade in many places—particularly where the road is flush against the hillside—there is no dedicated left-turn lane. Thus, motorists wishing to hang a louie at small streets are forced to come to a complete stop in the left lane and wait for a pause in the opposing stream of cars.

This behavior causes untoward delays even under the best of circumstances, where there aren't massive piles of mud being cleared away by bulldozers in the right lane. It can often take several minutes for a pause to appear, during which the line of cars behind the sinistral motorist can reach prodigious magnitude. Those stuck in this line often try to merge into the right lane in frustration, and the differential in speed between the two lanes is a recipe for disaster. Yes, this obstruction to traffic is legal under the traffic code, but legality does not imply rightfulness. The wise and considerate driver constructs his route so as to avoid making a left turn in a location where there is no left turn lane and a profuse flow of traffic, as a matter of good road citizenship. Citizenship, after all, is not only about following the letter of the law, but also evincing a general regard for one's compatriots.

That a driver would opt to block traffic in the only remaining lane of the street when conditions are already aggravated by construction vehicles and temporary laning marking seems all the more repugnant to the general good. After sitting in a twenty-minute line caused, in part, by a series of drivers performing just this thoughtless maneuever off of Sunset, the affront to decency seems particularly manifest. So be a good citizen of the road, and plan your trip accordingly. Thank you in advance.

posted by citizen sunshine @ 1:33 PM