I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile but just haven’t gotten around to it. I wanted to talk about the various tricks that I use on the road in getting to work. There are 2 major ones, both in/around the Kenwood area, right before I get on 71 North to come to work. The basic route is that I come up Hosbrook Road (usually after driving on one of my favorite-ly named roads, Shewango Way), then turn left onto Montgomery, and then right onto 71.

I have attached an edited image originally from Google Maps of the area, for those of you not familiar with this area. Pardon its crudity – my graphic design skills are limited to MS Paint. I think it serves its purpose well enough though.

First off is a trick I use if there are too many cars queued up to turn left from Hosbrook to Montgomery. It depends day to day on how many cars are lined up, but it can get pretty backed up since this is essentially THE route of choice for anyone in Madeira to get on 71 North. I’ve found that the limit is about 7 or 8 cars before you will not be able to make it through the left turn arrow and have to wait another traffic cycle. About 3 months ago or so, they widened Montgomery from 2 to 3 lanes each way, and in doing so modified the traffic lights. It used to be that the light at Hosbrook did not have an arrow, and it was just a green light and lasted a bit longer. You had to occasionally deal with people trying to go straight on Hosbrook (southbound), but not very often because (although you can’t really see it in the picture) Hosbrook deadends before 71 and there’s just office buildings back there, so the morning traffic coming out of it isn’t very much. So this trick used to apply, just not as frequently as it does now. In any case, when they widened the lanes, for a while we used to get a green arrow on Hosbrook and then when that ended we got a regular green light, which was almost as good, since as I’ve mentioned you don’t often have to yield to straight-folk. After awhile, they probably figured this configuration was causing too much backup on Montgomery (which is the main thoroughfare), so they changed it where now we usually get a green light and arrow and that’s it.

So, if there are more than about 7 or 8 cars, instead of getting behind them in the left turn lane, I go up to the straight/right lane, which usually has 0-2 cars in it (as I mentioned, pretty much everyone just turns left here). Then I go straight on Hosbrook, turn into National City Bank (NCB in the picture), go around the building, through the teller drive-through (nobody’s there because they’re not open yet), and then turn right on Montgomery. Usually this times out to have me ready to turn on Montgomery right after the last car that has turned left, and just before the cars coming straight on Montgomery get the green light. I have pondered if this is illegal or not, and I don’t think that it is. I seem to recall there’s a law against “evading a traffic light” or some such, like if you were wanting to turn right somewhere, and instead of waiting at the light, you cut through a gas station or something. My friends and I always used to do this when I was younger, on the pretext that we were “looking for 95 octane”. When the gas station didn’t sell it (because no gas station sells gas with an octane number that high) we would shrug our shoulders and say “Oh well”, and cut over to the other road. But in this scenario, I am legally following all applicable traffic lights.

In any case, the second trick is one that used to work a lot better before the aforementioned widening of Montgomery Road. First, a little setup. As I mentioned before, most of the cars turning left from Hosbrook are getting on 71. Of course, there are also cars coming NE bound on Montgomery wanting to turn left onto 71 North. Us as right turners have a Yield sign, so the people turning left have a right of way there, if there is nobody going straight on Montgomery. While they were doing the widening, you couldn’t turn left onto 71 here, so there were no problems turning right here. Of course that caused its own problems because instead of following the official detour which was to drive 2 miles north on Montgomery (like who is going to do that?), people would just turn left into Arby’s or Shell (located about where the O and R in WORK is in the picture), then turn around and make a right onto 71.

So, the trick here is that I act like I am going straight on Montgomery. You can make it look this way by not putting your right turn signal on and/or not slowing down like you’re about to make a turn. If you do it right, you can make the left-turning cars pause just enough that by the time they realize you’re turning, you’re ahead of them enough that you can right-turn ahead of them without having to yield. Like I said, this worked a lot better before when there were only 2 lanes each way. Now with 3 lanes, even though the 3rd lane is straight/right (as opposed to right turn only), the left turning cars sometimes just figure that you’re turning and go anyways. Where you get screwed up here is if you get car(s) in front of you that don’t know how to play this trick, so they slow down and let the left-turners go. Once they go and right-turning cars get backed up, there’s really no way to play this game because you have to stop and wait your turn until either the light turns red or a straight guy comes by.

All in all some very fun games that I play nearly every morning. Another by-product of the widening is that there is now a right turn only lane on Montgomery to Hosbrook, which is very handy for the coming home route. But that’s another story…