NO LEFT TURNS

I hate making a left turn while driving in a city because pedestrians pay no attention to the Do Not Walk sign and cause vehicular traffic to back up when they ignore the rules. This especially maddens me at the corners of Huron/Michigan (going west on Huron) and Erie/Michigan (going east on Superior). I have embarrassed many friends when I have yelled at the pedestrians screaming, “The signal says don’t walk. You suburbanites don’t know how to follow the signs.”


I am not the only person who hates left turns. In 1975, former FBI agent, Joseph Schott, published a book about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, called, “"No Left Turns." The title was derived from the fact that when anyone was driving the Director they had to establish routes that did not include left turns.


In a Washing Post story in 1995, book critic, Jonathan Yardley revisited the book and wrote the following descriptive about one section.


“On one memorable occasion, though, the home office descended on Schott. In November 1959 Hoover and Tolson decided to visit Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, whose presidential aspirations Hoover looked upon favorably. Schott's account of Fort Worth's preparations for this historic event, the event itself and its aftermath occupies some 30 pages and is the highest spot in a book that has many high ones. It begins with a long briefing by Fort Worth's SAC (special agent in charge) in which the route the guests would be driven from Love Field airport in Dallas to the Stephen F. Austin Hotel in Austin was traced inch by inch. "No sweat," Schott said, to which the SAC responded: "There's one catch. . . . There will be no left turns." That, as Schott says, "startled everybody," until "a good explanation" was put forth:


"In California several months before, the Director's chauffeur-driven car, while making a left turn, had been struck by another car from behind. The Director had been shaken up. He had been sitting on the left side behind the driver. Now he refused to sit on the left rear seat any more and had forbidden all left turns on auto trips."


UPS also hates left turns. When one of their big brown trucks is sitting idling in a left-hand turn lane it consumes time and gas. On an individual basis, not a lot of time or gas, but when there are more than 95,000 trucks delivering packages, the waste adds up. In 2006, the company developed “package-flow” software which included mapping out routes that would drastically reduce the number of left-hand turns drivers made.


How much did UPS save by the left-turn elimination? In the first year of use, according to Heather Robinson, a UPS spokeswoman, the software helped the company, “shave 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes, which has resulted in savings of roughly three million gallons of gas and reduced CO2 emissions by 31,000 metric tons. “


I only drive about 3,000 miles a year, so my eliminating left-hand turns won’t save much on gas or time. But being the conservative that I am, I hate going left anyway!