TRAFFIC CIRCLE OF DEATH

I was not thrilled to get the aged Mr. Ryan as my assigned driver’s ed teacher back in the mid-60’s. He’d been my dad’s high school track coach thirty years earlier and he kept calling me by my last name. He routinely yelled at me when I a) drove the car into a ditch, b) failed at all attempts to parallel park and c) jammed the clutch in and out at inappropriate times, stuttering my way down Main Street. Mr. Ryan agreed to pass me if I promised to never, ever again in my life attempt to drive a stick shift. I stuck to it, mostly. But here’s the thing. Mr. Ryan is long gone but there’s a new horror on the driving horizon: traffic circles. Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against the circle, personally. I like the Advent wreath and the Olympic rings. (I like all rings, actually.) I like the Native American dreamcatcher. Heck, the characters in my cozy mystery series set in the Upper Peninsula belong to a knitting circle. Traffic circles may make sense in London or Shang hai or New Jersey, but there is no earthly excuse to build them in Michigan, a state made up of snow and grids. So when I visited my hometown of Ann Arbor and began schlepping back and forth to the hospital twice a day, I was dismayed to discover that my seven-mile trek included three traffic circles. THREE! (On a related note, my mom, who lives in Ann Arbor, says nobody likes the danged circles.) Anyway, these circles, or as they are apparently called “roundabouts” – and let me just say that giving them a quaint, carousel-like name does not make the more palatable – caused my blood pressure to rise and my invective level compete with the number of steps on my Fitbit. Six times a day. I wound up in an emergency care facility on Washtenaw Avenue where – I kid you not – they thought it was important to measure my weight. COME ON, Ann Arbor! For those of you unfamiliar with the dreaded traffic circle, let me just print the rules of the road that I found on a very interesting South African website: As you arrive at a large traffic circle, traffic coming from your right has right of way, regardless of how many cars there are. Wait until there is a gap in the traffic and then easy slowly into the circle. Watch out for other traffic in the circle and be aware that they may not be using their indicators.” Yeah. That’ll work. If The Lion King celebrates the Circle of Life, the roundabout symbolizes the Dante’s ninth circle of hell. I say let’s send it the way of the clutch. I’ll just add that I love Ann Arbor, anyway.