And 'da Ven' recently saw a newspaper (or tee-vee) article about blind crossings, and how they all came about, because original streets were following cow tracks, before cars, and city planning, so they just paved those.... or something. Have heard it in many variants over the decades. So he read about this project someone somewhere had to straighten all the streets and alleviate the problems. Blind intersections do cause many accidents, after all.
And I thought... and said at the time... 'How wasteful.' So this has been a topic once before, and bring it up again: all you need are some convex mirrors. Voìla. I took the photo at the wrong angle in Gamlitz this year. I should have done it from across the street. If I had been in a car or truck across the street, and wanted to enter the 'Obere Hauptstrasse', I would be able to see oncoming traffic before advancing to enter it.... and the oncoming would see me, and sometimes even slow down accordingly and let me out.
The mirrors have been around forever, well, at least since the Seventies... and I have never been able to figure out why the US never adopted the idea. It would be a lot less costly than straightening all crooked roads and rezoning to avoid blind intersections....
I LURVE sitting in the front of the bus when we enter Ehrenhausen. The intersection that the driver has to take to get to the main square heads into a two-lane, horribly difficult turn for him. And there is a mirror. And he can see exactly how many on-coming cars there are. And the locals can see him, so the smart ones stop about a block away, becauase when he comes out of there, the damned thing is so long, he has to shortly pull into the oncoming lane to turn comepletely, then gets into the right one, and invariably, the driver performs a sort of salute, hand to the head as 'thank you', and the driver of the car does the same.
It's common drivers' courtesy there. And nothing really special. And we never really read about accidents happening at blind intersections, because they aren't blind. Win-win.
Sometimes simple solutions turn out to be the most practical. And now that I got that off my chest----again.... may many solutions to all our problems this year be so deceptively simple.
The mirrors have been around forever, well, at least since the Seventies... and I have never been able to figure out why the US never adopted the idea. It would be a lot less costly than straightening all crooked roads and rezoning to avoid blind intersections....
I LURVE sitting in the front of the bus when we enter Ehrenhausen. The intersection that the driver has to take to get to the main square heads into a two-lane, horribly difficult turn for him. And there is a mirror. And he can see exactly how many on-coming cars there are. And the locals can see him, so the smart ones stop about a block away, becauase when he comes out of there, the damned thing is so long, he has to shortly pull into the oncoming lane to turn comepletely, then gets into the right one, and invariably, the driver performs a sort of salute, hand to the head as 'thank you', and the driver of the car does the same.
It's common drivers' courtesy there. And nothing really special. And we never really read about accidents happening at blind intersections, because they aren't blind. Win-win.
Sometimes simple solutions turn out to be the most practical. And now that I got that off my chest----again.... may many solutions to all our problems this year be so deceptively simple.
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