A Lefty Screed.

Hello.

Many years ago, I heard a rumor that was too preposterous to believe, even for a teenage cynic like me. It was said that J. Edgar Hoover was such a right-wing nutcake that he ordered his personal chauffeur to never turn left. I dismissed it as entertaining twaddle, like the story of Hoover’s cross-dressing.

But the internet now tells me that the story was almost true. Hoover did once instruct his chauffeur never to turn left. It wasn’t for political reasons, though. It was because he was once hit from behind while trying to turn left through oncoming traffic. He considered the maneuver inherently unsafe.

I have recently decided that Hoover was correct about the evil of hanging Louies. I suspect it is the only thing he and I have ever agreed upon.

I am not scared of turning left through traffic, though. But in the privacy of my car I cuss and berate drivers who wait at a green light to make the turn while timidly looking for a break in oncoming traffic — especially in cases where it prevents people behind them from moving around them. This consigns those other drivers to have to wait through another whole light cycle to proceed. My bitterest anger is directed at two subsets of these flagrant left-turners:

1. Those who don’t signal their left until an instant beforehand, meaning that if you are behind them you have no warning, no time to navigate around them first, often meaning you are trapped there, with cars whizzing by you on the right.

2. Those fearful wimps who don’t even pull out into the intersection a little so the trapped folks behind have a shot at squeezing past them.

Here is these drivers’ message to the world: “I am Lord of the Left Turn. Those stuck behind me can go shit on a stick.”

I only countenance turning left across traffic when it does not inconvenience others. I myself will often not make the left I need, and then make three rights, to avoid doing this to others. I am a particular vocal advocate of designated left-turn lanes, which solves the problem.

Alert: Be careful what you wish for.

—

The video at the top of the column was taken by Rachel this morning at the corner of C Street and 17th Street NE, three blocks from where we live in Washington D.C. The left turn signal was recently installed there as part of a big C-Street traffic makeover; it was designed, no doubt, to resolve complexities involving left-hand turns across a lane of often heavy oncoming traffic.

So far so good.

But this left-turn light signal lasts all of nine seconds. Check the video out if you haven’t already. The left arrow lasts about as long as the very first couplet of La Marseillaise as sung by Claude Rains Paul Henreid and Corinna Mura in the first key moment of of Casablanca’s bar scene:

Allons enfants de la Patrie … Le jour de gloire est arrivé. That’s it.

In short, this has to be the shortest green light in D.C.

Unhelpfully, the city has erected a sign out there on C Street informing you that it is illegal to turn left on red even if there are no oncoming cars. So the situation, in a sense, is worse than it used to be.

If you are the first car in line behind the car at the red light, and the driver at the red light is asleep at the wheel when the light turns green, you may well not make the light and have to wait through the next cycle, which is over a minute.

If you are the second car in line behind the car at the red light, you will likely miss the light unless the first car catches the green instantly, and the second car’s driver hotfoots it, too, and still you’re barely barely making it through the yellow. (The left turn lane can accommodate at least five cars.)

I have noted that for a brief period each day — the morning rush hour — the left-turn light lengthens by several seconds, but that is NOT the time it is most needed. Traffic tends to barrel down C Street to get most efficiently to work. To divert would be to lose time.

I have asked for an explanation from the city. Still awaiting one.

—

So.

What is my point?

Don’t have one, really. I’m just angry in general these days, and feeling particularly impotent. I am merely raging against The Machine, as are we all.

—

Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll.

—

Please direct your questions and observations here:

And ….

Seriously, can you get stuff like this anywhere else?

Or, we could do it the direct, plebeian way. It’s one buck a week, for four or five columns: