10 things Erik and I despise about driving in Boston

As much as we love living in the Boston area, driving can be a bit insane sometimes. We have been spoiled by the grid system in Utah but have since driven quite a few places and Boston is by far the most ridiculous.

Mikaela's top 5:

1- Signs indicating the name of cross streets are a rare commodity.

2- Streets with the EXACT same name often exist in close proximity leading to much confusion. Knowing the name of a major street is often times useless since that name is used to describe major roads in every surrounding city. For example there are streets named Broadway, Massachusetts Avenue, Washington Street, Elm Street etc found in Everett, Somerville, Cambridge, Malden, Brookline, Charlestown, Boston etc.

3- When driving along a major road such as Main street in Malden you must make a 90 degree turn - onto a road that was running perpendicular to the road you were just on - in order to stay on Main Street. Does that even make sense!! The road formerly known as main street now becomes known as something else.

4- Drivers that have the right of way going straight through an intersection that yield to oncoming cars turning left, exacerbating the already hectic traffic.

5- Traffic lights with motion sensors have not caught on here yet leading to pointless red lights that are waay too long and completely inefficient.

Erik's top 5:
1- The Mystery Fork: you're on a major road and it forks with no indication
of which fork you should take to stay on that major road. often leads to #2.

2- Guess that road: the best method of figuring out the name of the road you are traveling on is to open someone's mailbox and see what is written on the outside of the envelope

3- Rotary nitwits: nothing worse than the guy in the rotary who slams on his brakes when a car approaches from a side street.

4- Left lane remorse: As there are no turn lanes you will often come to a stop light with two lanes. All of us with brains know that being in any position other than first in the left most lane means you will likely sit through the entire light waiting for the car in front of you to turn left. As such, we get into the right lane which is typically much more congested. There is always one guy who zooms up in the left lane, and after the light turns green flips on his right blinker and cuts off the poor soul who erroneously thinks that a car traveling straight in it's own lane isn't required to yield to the loser who picked the wrong lane.

5- Resident's only parking: in order to stop in Cambridge you have to either pay utilities there or ride in on camel

Hopefully you enjoyed reading these- it's much easier to laugh at these things when you're not in a car. Although we have gotten quite good at navigating our way around this city we are getting a GPS and cannot wait!