I'm listening to Fresh Air with Terry Gross and the author interviewed is Tom Vanderbuilt who has written a book called Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do. (He should, if he doesn't already, have a whole chapter on the Boston driver--a rare, thankfully, but highly vicious species of driver.)
Anyway at one point here in the interview he promotes "roundabouts" or, as we call them in these parts, rotaries. The Terry Gross asks him to explain what that is.
Ha ha ha ha. Isn't that hilarious?
Wait, you don't know what it is is, either? Oh.
Having driven to the Common Saturday from home and back, the idea that people don't know what a rotary is just strikes me as weird. How is it something I must face daily could be so foreign to so many of my countrymen? From West Roxbury to the Boston Common, I think there are 6 rotaries you have to take. How do I feel about them? Yeah, they work. I don't know if it'd be a good idea to, as Vanderbuilt suggests, replace all stoplights with "roundabouts". That might be bedlam. But it's funny that something I know so out of hand is foreign to many others.
Like the Californian who asks, "What's that?" in the New Englander's shed in summer, pointing at a snow blower.
No comments:
Post a Comment