I live near Albany, NY’s Western/Madison/Allen intersection. It isn’t straightforward to explain it. On the map, the red line is US Route 20. To the west, it’s Western Avenue. Where it makes the bend, it becomes Madison Avenue, but Western Avenue continues if you follow the straight line.
A “Getting There” column in the Times Union from 2015 contained this convoluted-sounding but utterly accurate question. “When coming north off South Allen Street and taking a left onto Western Avenue (you cannot take a left onto Madison Avenue) or going straight onto North Allen, there is most often confusion in the intersection. Cars coming south on North Allen can make a left onto both Madison and Western Avenues.”
Thus, WALK lights are needed to allow pedestrians to cross the streets safely. That is unless a driver is on Madison Avenue and makes an illegal right turn onto North Allen. And by “illegal,” I mean there is both a word and a graphic sign prohibiting it. Still, cars make that turn. Recently, three vehicles in a row did so.
Allen Street is but one lane in each direction. A red light came on when a fire truck was racing south down North Allen, so cars weren’t moving. Nor could they pull over because it’s a neighborhood with a lot of street parking. The truck passed eight vehicles, got through the intersection with sirens blaring, and went on its way.
What was audacious, and one of my neighbors saw it as well, was that the fifth car in line followed the fire vehicle. Since it did NOT have a siren, it almost caused an accident at the intersection.
Yield to the ambulance!
A few weeks later – last week – an ambulance was racing east on Western. It couldn’t travel straight onto Madison because cars stopped at a traffic light. So it had to head back to the common road area, then veer back onto Madison.
Meanwhile, a vehicle is heading west at Madison’s end, which normally would have had the right of way save for the approaching ambulance. Somehow, I waved the car down – the driver possibly thought I was daft – and it stopped. The ambulance veers back onto Madison, as I expected, and the crisis is averted.
It’s a weird intersection. In 2005 (!), I wrote The Streets of Albany Were Designed by Sadists. It’s more an issue of bad surveying, but the effect is the same.
The good thing is that the intersection is a major stop for the CDTA buses: the #10 Western, the #114 (it’ll get me to the train station); the #106 (circumnavigates the city), the #111 (UAlbany), and the new express #910.
Old cities have quirky aspects.
The late John Wolcott had a very plausible theory that early in the City’s existence, compasses were used to lay out streets. What people didn’t know back then was that the North Magnetic Pole shifts quite a bit, unpredictably. So each time they laid out a new street (often decades apart) they’d consult their compasses and discover that the last guys who laid out streets got it all wrong. So they followed what they figured was the true data. This was NBD when Albany (or Beverwick) was a large village with dirt streets. But when the City expanded westward and extended these streets, they crashed into each other at odd places. Again, NBD before cars took over the roadways in the early 20th Century, but now we are stuck with these old errors.
Ahhhh, I have some experience with intersections like that…there’s a street in Jamestown, one of the “main drags” in the area, that just…changes street name. It enters the city from one direction and then it shifts to another, but there’s no “intersection” per se, which I remember confusing people who would stop in to ask directions when I worked at that town’s Bob Evans.
More locally now, a few miles of our own local section of US20 is Transit Road as it runs north-south, but there’s a spot where it turns to run northeast-southwest, while another road spurs off to the left and keeps going north-south. The “natural” section of the road morphs into Southwestern Blvd. at that point, while you have to specifically stop and turn to keep going on Transit Rd! Strange. (That particular intersection has also seen lots of accidents over the years, so it was recently converted to a lighted interchange.)