Boston Driving Tips

How to survive on the mean streets

Drivers in Boston are always ready to help you out on the streets. Be it a friendly toot on the horn, or pointing the way to go oddly never with the index finger. If, however, you want to get the low down before you head out on the streets. There's pleanty of written information to be had too.

Check out this excerpt from on helpful "User's guide to the city", Ask Mr. Boston.

Q. Who has the right of way in a rotary?
-- N.R.

A. Ah, for the good old days! Mr. Boston spends a lot of time sighing like that, it seems. Once, the rules of the rotary were simple: Whoever had the least to lose had the right of way. Mr. Boston used to love outdueling nice shiny new Cadillacs and Lexuses in his old beater of an '81 Omni with the crushed-in hood and liberal amounts of rust. No way would Mr. $30,000 Behemothmobile dare a chrome-bender! Zip, zip, zip went Mr. Boston as he raced around the rotary.

But all that was before sport utility vehicles. The people who drive these things are nuts. They think they can ignore the rules of physics in the snow and they show no fear in rotaries, comforted, no doubt, by those recent studies that show that in a collision between an SUV and a normal vehicle, the SUV will crush the regular auto like a bug against a windshield. So Mr. Boston is forced to fall back on the Second Law of Rotaries: In a big rotary, like the ones that make up the West Roxbury Parkway, whoever's already in the rotary has the right of way. In a little rotary, like the ones along Fresh Pond Parkway, whoever's not in the rotary has the right of way.

Please note that these are empirical rules, not legal ones (legally, the person in the rotary ALWAYS has the right of way - see: Mass Driving Law). For some reason, the above is just the way it works, i.e., when Mr. Boston is on the West Roxbury Parkway, he notices that people entering the rotary usually stop for oncoming traffic; but when driving along Fresh Pond Parkway, people already in the rotary usually stop for incoming traffic.

From: Ask Mr. Boston