The Gloucester Clam’s Tournament of Crappy Intersections: Finals!

Wow, we’ve finally made it to the last battle in our Tournament of Shitty Intersections. We started with 16 of the most awful intersections in town, and we’re down to our last two. Let’s take a look at our contestants:

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Last round, Flannagan Square took on Centennial at Washington St. It was a tough battle with a close margin – Centennial and Washington is quite the quarter-panel destroyer of an intersection. But Flannagan Square just has so much more crazy swirling around it. I mean, just yesterday we were discussing how this city doesn’t like change, especially regarding traffic habits. So naturally, one of the worst intersections in town will be the ONE THAT JUST CHANGED THE STOP SIGNS AROUND. And by “just” I mean, like six years ago, but that’s barely any time at all on the island. And no one, NO ONE coming west from Rogers to go down Main ever actually successfully navigates the stop. You have to stop. At the stop line. After the car in front of you proceeds. It’s not an option, you are not a train. When there are two stopped lines of cars, the person who stopped first goes. Not “the person who stopped and then the DeVille behind him.” I’m looking at you, old lady who I beeped at in a terrified manner because you kept on truckin’.

Flannagan’s is most definitely deserving of its spot in the finals. I have barely even scratched the surface of how annoying it is when there’s approximately seventy-three people trying to get gas after work at the exact same time, or how LITERALLY NO ONE on Rogers St will let you take a left – seriously, anywhere else in town, you’re likely to be let into traffic quickly. It’s like people go through a cloud of nerve gas that makes you be a dick about driving just in the general vicinity of Flannagan’s, but usually it’s just a cloud of burning fish fryer oil.

Our other finalist is, unsurprisingly, Maplewood, Railroad, and Prospect. Whoever designed this intersection really pulled out the big guns on this clusterfuck. “Let’s take three super busy roads and make them intersect in a K, but make it so there’s no stop signs anywhere in the entire intersection. No, make one stop sign, just to mix it up a bit. Make the crosswalks kind of faded. Make sure you stick a buoy right in the goddamn middle. It’s genius! I have clearly been paid off by the local chapter of the Horn, Bumper, and Taillight Plastic Manufacturers Union.”

So make sure you vote on the winner! We’ll be back next week to crown the champion!

 


 

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4 Comments

  1. Both. So where are all the “kindly” GloMassholes who stop at the WORST, most STUPID places in sensibly moving traffic to “let people in”? They seem to avoid these two places completely!

  2. I can’t believe the Clam sometimes, I mean seriously KT you really show your not from town when you complain about the Buoy. With all the fishermen driving around town, and the fact that the red right returning rule actually works at the intersection, that buoy is the only thing that keeps things flowing at the end of maple wood / railroad ave.

  3. I had to go with Flannagan on this one…I’ll actually take my chances with a head-on collision on Friend St. rather than navigate this C-F. At least with the anarchic nature of Maplewood/Railroad/Prospect, you can pretty much will yourself through in a fairly short amount of time.

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