THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, June 10, 1996 TAG: 9606080008
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A7 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: OPINION
SOURCE: George Hebert
LENGTH: 51 lines
Every now and then, that highway instruction is also an announcement of immediate trouble and/or tension.
Limited-access roadways are at their best in long stretches between connections to other thoroughfares. That is, between ramps. But things can get sticky when other cars are nudging in from a ramp or trying to make their way off.
One of scariest situations (or most infuriating even if you're deft enough to somehow avoid danger) is the one where a regular traffic lane, along which you're tootling serenely, converts - wham! - into an exit-only corridor. It's somewhat comparable to being caught, on some city street, in a lane that has abruptly become legal to nothing but left-turning vehicles. Or right-turning ones.
Out on big highways, when my good cruising-speed lane turns into a compulsory exit-only lane, there may be no great squeeze - if traffic is sparse. But that doesn't seem to be the case in the predicaments I fall into.
The problem is a kind of high-velocity entrapment. I find the exit-only sign has jumped into the picture too late for me to respond comfortably and safely. I can remember a whole series of worst-case scenarios, hereabouts and around the country, when escape from such exit-lane boxes meant breaking into, somehow, a swiftly moving wall of chock-a-block machines whose drivers seemed to studiously avoid seeing me and my predicament.
But the problem isn't really the unconcerned drivers who shut you out. It's the intersection design itself and what the signs say - or don't say or don't say soon enough.
There's a spot in Norfolk, for just one nearby example, where drivers leaving the Naval Base along Interstate 564 and feeding into I-64 East may think they have several lanes to choose from to maintain a through course. But one of these lanes on the right is destined to become, with almost no advance word, an exit-only path onto Tidewater Drive. I sometimes wonder how many motorists have found themselves on the latter and couldn't figure out what happened.
This is in unhappy contrast to an exit-only lane over on I-64 East in the vicinity of the Hampton Coliseum. The turn-off route there is marked by three or four warning signs, all but the last well ahead of the point of no return. No strain; no pain.
This illustrates the obvious: Surprise is the enemy. Plenty of notice, starting a long way from the crunch juncture, should be the order of the day.
Everybody wants to keep our roadsides and overheads free of unnecessary signs. Clear, safety-geared exit instructions aren't unnecessary. MEMO: Mr. Hebert, a former editor, lives in Norfolk. by CNB