Massachusetts Driving Gothic

gnine2:

xparrot:

samjohnssonvt:

copperbadge:

dame-of-dames:

imaginarycircus:

theshmaylor:

pervocracy:

• You don’t know what street you’re on.  Every intersection, there’s a street sign, but it only tells you the name of the other street.  Perhaps your street has no name.  Perhaps it doesn’t exist.
• The road has two lanes.  You thought it had three, but suddenly there are two.  Now three again.  Now one.
• Construction workers close down a street.  They work for years.  No one says what they’re doing, but machinery moves back and forth and great clouds of smoke go up into the sky.  When they finally leave, the street looks as if they were never there.
• Roads were named, back in the old times, by the city they went to.  A road that went to Boston was Boston Road.  But many roads lead to Boston.  So there are many Boston Roads.  They do not connect to each other.  They are all Boston Road.
• You have forgotten what a parking space looks like.  You have forgotten what it means to park.  You simply drive forever, in circles.  It feels natural enough.
• Blue lights flash in front of you, the street swarms with police; an accident?  A crime?  Some kind of disaster?  But at the heart of the blue-clad swarm there is nothing but a single man in a yellow vest, digging a small hole by the side of the road.
• You have to be in the left lane to turn right, the sign says.  You have to be in the right lane to turn left.  The sign that explains this is hung directly over the intersection.
• The pedestrians lurch out in front of your car, heedless of the danger, of their own soft bodies and the hardness of steel.  They may think your car would simply pass through them.  They may be right.
• You are on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  You have always been, and will always be, on I-93, at rush hour, going one mile an hour.  In the neighboring cars, babies are born, old people are dying, small tribes are forming.
• You are on Storrow Drive.  Somehow, you do not die.

While on Storrow Drive you attempt to avoid eye contact with the decapitated corpses of uhaul trucks

You need to go across the river. All the bridges are under construction. The T isn’t running. The sun goes behind the clouds. The skies vomit rain. You think your shoes will never dry. The rain stops very suddenly. It’s 98 degrees and humid. Your shoes dissolve. You consider swimming across the Charlies, when the sun goes behind the clouds again. It starts to snow. You take up residence in the nearest Dunkin Donuts and wait for social security payments to start coming in.

@scifigrl47 and @copperbadge

I actually have never driven in Boston and yet I still have personal experience of many of these, none more so than the one about the pedestrians. 

People in Boston jaywalk like nobody else on Earth. It’s not even just a casual disregard for traffic, it’s an aggressive disdain. The first time I visited Boston I was there for ten days and I jaywalked more in those ten days than in my entire twenty years of life up to that point. 

First rule of driving in Boston downtown is to expect pedestrians everywhere except the crosswalks.

You have to be in the left lane to turn right, the sign says.  You have
to be in the right lane to turn left.  The sign that explains this is
hung directly over the intersection. 

No, there is no sign! The only directives are painted on the roads themselves. You wonder if at one time cars and snow were transparent. Or maybe they are intended for the apocalypse, when you will at last be the only car on the road, still carefully keeping to your proper empty lane.

You go to make a turn, but the road is one way in the opposite direction. At the next intersection the road is also one way in the wrong direction. Same at the next intersection, and the next. Finally you turn the wrong direction out of desperation, accepting that that side of the city if forever locked behind one-way roads heading away.