Roads

It's about a ten minute walk from my place to the office, but on the way I have to cross one river and five roads, and walk under/over a further three roads. This is because, of the three types of American university, Urban, Suburban, or Rural, BU is definitely in the first category. It straddles Commonwealth Avenue, a huge artery transporting 30,000 vehicles a day (none of which are Nissan Micras, let me assure you, [despite my personal opinion that these cars, especially grey ones with orange seats and three inch spoilers are God's Own Cars and not at all girly]), with three lanes each way plus a T line down the middle. It also sits on top of the Massachusetts Turnpike, the I-90, the longest interstate motorway in the country, connecting Boston on the East with Seattle on the West. The best way I can describe the Mass Pike, which I walk past several times a day, is as a busy version of the M1. On the other side of our building is Storrow Drive, which is another major route out of/into the city (think of the A1 here), and in my opinion is the worst of the lot because it falls between BU and the Charles River, spoiling what would be a relatively tranquil area. It was apparently the last of Boston's land reclamation projects, which on the one hand created a lovely park next to the river and on the other spoiled it by dumping a bloody huge road next to it. There's talk about sinking it underground, a pastime that Bostonians seem to do a lot of. They've spent the last twenty years burying their major roads in a project called the Big Dig. We complain in the UK about the millennium Dome and Wembley; this project started in 1985 at an initial estimate of 2.5 billion dollars - it was completed in January of this year, having cost about fifteen billion dollars. Not only that, but sections of it have started collapsing, with at least one fatality.

Anyway, I have a lot of roads to cross. This, like tipping, is an art that I have yet to fathom. The obvious fact that I have to consciously overcome 27 years of habit of looking to the right at a junction notwithstanding, there are plenty of other factors. Bostonian drivers for one. It seems that knowledge of the traffic laws (I assume there are some), and the willingness to follow them, are not necessarily prerequisites for being allowed to drive a lethal weapon over here. Signalling is optional, whereas hooting is not. I have visions of potential driving test candidates practicing their horn-lore ("If someone makes the barest hint that they may cut up the person three cars in front of you, what is the appropriate length of hoot? (a) 2 seconds, (b) 10 seconds (c) three minutes")*. Another factor is that I have to walk past one of the few roundabouts ("rotaries") in the country. Bostonian drivers seem to be unable to cope with a curvy road, and tend to drive into each other (and hoot appropriately) with abandon. Yet another factor is traffic lights. These seem to flash randomly - there have been more than a few occasions when a light has instructed me to cross whilst the transverse traffic light was blatantly green. The upshot is that I tend to hover nervously at junctions trying to look in six directions at once, trying to gauge which drivers are going to let me cross at the zebra crossing (which they are legally obliged to do, apparently). Everybody else seems to have a sixth sense and know when they can brazenly step out and when to hold back. I'm sure that eventually, with practice and more than a bit of luck, I'll get the hang of it. For now, I'm happy being a nervous hoverer.

*The answer is apparently (c).