Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Roads in Boston: Part I

This is an intersection in the Boston area. We live pretty close to this intersection.

Now, one might wonder, how does a road like this work? What if you want to get from Kappy's Liquor to the Coldstone Creamery? What would you do?

The red is the route you would take.The green? Well it's a quiz to let you guess how many lights are in that intersection
.
.
.
.
Answer: A hundred million.

You can imagine driving through this intersection, the amount of honking, emergency stopping, last minute lane-changes that exists.



Here is another intersection close to where we live.

Let's say you are on the west side of the this parkway and you need to get to Best Buy...how does it work?

Oh what? You think we turned too early? You mean we can continue down that parkway and make a left at the next intersection? GPS certainly thinks so...but you are all WRONG. There's no left turn at the rotary...not even illegally cuz it's blocked. If you want to enter the rotary, you should have have entered it from the first intersection....

What happens if you didn't know and you missed the first turn? Good luck...no way for you to leave that parkway for quite a bit....


You tell me what that is.


Oh, and no, these are not one-off intersections and we happen to live in an area that has them. You can find these 8 way intersections and rotaries everywhere in Boston. Just check googlemap.

3 comments:

some grad student said...

The 90-93 intersection isn't that bad, considering those things are all stacked vertically :)

Here's the satellite image of that:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=boston+90+and+93&ie=UTF8&hl=en&ll=42.347087,-71.059195&spn=0.004425,0.009645&t=k&z=17

Tal said...

It's a rotary. That's the whole point, to only have one way to turn. If you miss it, keep going around.

From what I understand, this is quite common in Europe.

Lynn said...

yes tal, i know it's a rotary. and yes, quite common. that's not the point is it?