[Mikeod]

Originally Posted by Dr Winston O Boogie jr

There does seem to be an inordinate number of accidents at the intersections of Morse and 466, Morse and 466A, Buena Vista and 466 and Buena Vista and 466A.

I honestly don't think that it has to do with being allowed to turn left on green. That rule in in effect everywhere in the country. It probably has more to do with the fact that there are so many senior citizens, who no longer see well and who have diminished reflexes driving cars.

Don't forget, the law says that you can turn left on a green light only if it is safe to do so. If that is the scenario with most of these accidents, then people are turing when it is not safe to do so. I would hate to see a change in the procedure that would punish the people that know how to drive in order to accommodate those who don't.

I think attributing it to age, vision, and reflexes is too convenient. Most of the close calls I have experienced here have involved drivers of all ages. The common threads have been ignorance of the rules (see roundabouts) and excessive speed, as in too much of a hurry. Read the thread about the person who stopped to let a family of ducks cross Morse and the reaction of the idiot behind her. Not age related at all.

Originally Posted by Dr Winston O Boogie jr

I honestly don't think that it has to do with being allowed to turn left on green. That rule in in effect everywhere in the country. It probably has more to do with the fact that there are so many senior citizens, who no longer see well and who have diminished reflexes driving .

First off do we know the ages of the folks involved in this crash? If age played a factor then I agree. My mother in law is 84 , , driving but doesn't go anywhere where she has to take a left unless there's an arrow saying it's safe to do so. I believe a green arrow on 466A turning left into Morse or Buena Vista is a good idea.

[dbussone]

Originally Posted by TheVillageChicken

While the rest of you sort out the logistics of traffic control, I'll say a prayer for the injured.

Amen.

[redwitch]

The accident my grandson was involved in at BV and 466 was caused by a driver jumping the light to make a left turn. Too many people in a hurry and just not willing to wait their turn. It would have helped if mu grandson's uncle had waited a second before moving his car. Just because you have the light doesn't make it right or safe.

[PaPaLarry]

Looks like a "Traffic Study" for that location needs to be made.

[graciegirl]

If only some drivers would not treat a red light as only a "suggestion".

[Madelaine Amee]

Originally Posted by graciegirl

If only some drivers would not treat a red light as only a "suggestion".

........ and a STOP sign ................. and, if only, the other driver would use their turn signals to at least give me a clue where you want to go!

[Cathy H]

Of course, every driver is a "traffic engineer", so here is my analysis (no fee required): the left turning vehicle on a green light usually enters the opposing lane at a slow, turning, speed and since the opposite 3 lanes are so wide, the driver miscalculates the time required to clear all 3 lanes and exposes himself/herself to risk of collision with speeding vehicles who also may miscalculate the time you will take to get out of their way. The best solution is governing the left turn lane with a green arrow, but this will have a cost: the opposite traffic will be delayed and more gasoline will be consumed by idling engines.

[Ruthtomnorma3]

DianeM. Sent a nice PM .....

[CFrance]

Originally Posted by Dr Winston O Boogie jr

There does seem to be an inordinate number of accidents at the intersections of Morse and 466, Morse and 466A, Buena Vista and 466 and Buena Vista and 466A.

I honestly don't think that it has to do with being allowed to turn left on green. That rule in in effect everywhere in the country. It probably has more to do with the fact that there are so many senior citizens, who no longer see well and who have diminished reflexes driving cars.

Don't forget, the law says that you can turn left on a green light only if it is safe to do so. If that is the scenario with most of these accidents, then people are turing when it is not safe to do so. I would hate to see a change in the procedure that would punish the people that know how to drive in order to accommodate those who don't.

Those intersections are large and busy. You cannot turn left on a green light off of 441. The green arrow turns red. I think it's time to change these intersections to that way of handling left-hand turns. However, I'm sure there's some sort of traffic flow amount that has to be met in order to do that.

We passed that accident just after it happened. It actually looked like someone on 466A attempted to turn left onto BV into the southbound lanes instead of turning into the proper side of the median, into the northbound lane.

[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

Originally Posted by Cathy H

Of course, every driver is a "traffic engineer", so here is my analysis (no fee required): the left turning vehicle on a green light usually enters the opposing lane at a slow, turning, speed and since the opposite 3 lanes are so wide, the driver miscalculates the time required to clear all 3 lanes and exposes himself/herself to risk of collision with speeding vehicles who also may miscalculate the time you will take to get out of their way. The best solution is governing the left turn lane with a green arrow, but this will have a cost: the opposite traffic will be delayed and more gasoline will be consumed by idling engines.

Exactly. And, you're also punishing the vast majority of drivers that can execute a simple left hand turn safely for the few that cause these accidents.

And we also have to consider the idiots that are coming in the opposite direction, that see someone making a left hand turn when they shouldn't, and don't slow down. Or maybe they're texting and don't look up in time.

[CFrance]

But I don't think those are simple left-hand turns at those intersections anymore. They're becoming more and more congested.

[villagetinker]

OK here is my take. I was personally involved in a near miss at Buena Vista and 466a. I was heading west, with headlights on in a bright red car (can you say I look like a fire truck!! grin) and the person going east decides they can make the left turn. I had to jam on the brakes so hard the ABS kicked in, hit the horn, and just missed them. The person next to me in the driving lane also just missed them.

So here is my take, keep the current green left turn arrow at the beginning of the traffic cycle, and then go to a RED left turn arrow once the opposing traffic has a green light. I know this will be VERY annoying to people in light traffic conditions, but during heavy traffic, these intersections with LIMITED view of the opposing traffic lanes need to stop left turns, before we kill someone.

[CFrance]

Originally Posted by villagetinker

OK here is my take. I was personally involved in a near miss at Buena Vista and 466a. I was heading west, with headlights on in a bright red car (can you say I look like a fire truck!! grin) and the person going east decides they can make the left turn. I had to jam on the brakes so hard the ABS kicked in, hit the horn, and just missed them. The person next to me in the driving lane also just missed them.

So here is my take, keep the current green left turn arrow at the beginning of the traffic cycle, and then go to a RED left turn arrow once the opposing traffic has a green light. I know this will be VERY annoying to people in light traffic conditions, but during heavy traffic, these intersections with LIMITED view of the opposing traffic lanes need to stop left turns, before we kill someone.

That's what I was saying. It's too busy an intersection for a total green for the left-turn lane.

[CaptainMorgan]

Subject: Cars, Left Turns, Growing Up, and Dying
By Michael Gartner (Michael Gartner has been editor of newspapers large and small and president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.)

My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say I never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you had to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look every which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or drive through life and miss it."

At which point my mother, a sometimes salty Irishwoman, chimed in: "Oh, bull----!" she said. "He hit a horse." "Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors all had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two doors down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to work and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home, my mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar stop, meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and sometimes, at dinner, we'd ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. "No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was that. But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we'll get one."

It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first. But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department at a Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't drive, it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old, she asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery, the place where I learned to drive the following year and where, a generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving.

The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in the cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver in the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning.

If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he'd take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever she drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going to the beauty parlor, he'd sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll or, if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to the Cubs game on the radio. In the evening, then, when I'd stop by, he'd explain: "The Cubs lost again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the millionaire on first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the bags out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream. As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she was 88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"

"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read an article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said.
So your mother and I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again.

"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as a left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You're kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works."

But then she added: "Except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started laughing. "Loses count?" I asked.

"Yes," my father admitted, "that sometimes happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you're okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a bad day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off another day or another week." My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her car keys and said she had decided to quit driving.

That was in 1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father died the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved into in 1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my brother and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew the shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was 101 because he was afraid he'd fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to keep exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment he died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had to give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us that he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation about politics and newspapers and things in the news.

A few weeks earlier, he had told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier than the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said, "You know, I'm probably not going to live much longer."

"You're probably right," I said.

"Why would you say that?" he countered, somewhat irritated.

"Because you're 102 years old," I said.

"Yes," he said, "you're right." He stayed in bed all the next day. That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point, apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said: "I would like to make an announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: "I want you to know," he said, clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have."
A short time later, he died. I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I've wondered now and then how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long. I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life or because he quit taking left turns.