Peter T. Glenshaw ’86 lives in Lyme, New Hampshire. He was a Flat Hat Opinions writer during his undergraduate years. You can contact him at pglenshaw@gmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
I returned to the College of William and Mary recently for my 40th college reunion, and I have to admit, ye old schoole looked pretty good.
There were lots of new academic buildings, dorms and athletic and student facilities. Some buildings were gone (including Yates Hall, my freshman dorm) and some were imaginatively redone. The city of Williamsburg has also changed for the better. Its many stores, restaurants and hotels are improvements from the time when I was a student. All in all, it was refreshing to see the capital improvements which have modernized the second-oldest college in the country and the town in which it resides.
That noted, there is one place in the beloved ’burg that has not changed: Confusion Corner.
On the edge of where the William and Mary campus meets Merchant Square, three roads converge — Boundary Street, Richmond Road and Jamestown Road — without a stop light to coordinate the flow of automobile traffic and pedestrians.
How has this seemingly ill-designed intersection remained unchanged 40 years after I graduated?
It boggles my mind that no one has bothered to install a traffic light or flashing pedestrian cross-walk signs, known formally as Rectangular Rapid Flashing Beacons.
I live near Dartmouth College, and there are several of these pedestrian beacons on the streets of Hanover, New Hampshire — each of them designed to keep vehicles driven by older people with poor vision from getting into an accident with younger students with little contextual awareness.
With no known plans to install a similar device, let alone a traffic light, I am forced to consider another direction to bring attention to this matter. Instead of aiming to prevent an accident, maybe we should aim to optimize Confusion Corner for maximum messiness and disorientation.
For instance, why not build a NASCAR-style banked turn for the automobiles and eliminate the speed limit (Autobahn-style) to encourage maximum acceleration into the corner?
Or consider putting the three roads underground in unlit tunnels. Or, better yet, tunnels illuminated with strobe lights.
A pedestrian crossing with lights might help, as noted above, but maybe a better alternative would be a rope bridge across the roadway which pedestrians must cross as the automobile traffic travels underneath their swaying feet? Maybe add a wind machine at the end of the bridge for more laughs.
If these ideas ask too much of the City of Williamsburg and its planning staff, a better plan would be to relocate the roads themselves.
I’ve long thought that the grounds in front of the Sir Christopher Wren Building are underused. Why not knock down the brick walls on Richmond Road and Jamestown Road and add a roundabout in the middle of the Wren lawn?
Yes, it would likely mean removing the President’s House, the President’s Guest House (when was this a thing?) and the Brafferton, but is there not a high price to be paid for progress?
The Wren Roundabout would be a smashing initiative, I think, and near guarantee of commotion.
Finally, no white-boarding, blue-skying, throwing-pasta-on-the-wall session would be complete unless I raised an idea dismissed for decades that, upon reflection, might have something worth our consideration.
I speak, of course, of adding a few bike lanes to Confusion Corner.
And maybe a lane for trailer tractors. And a lane for those weird skateboards with the tiny engines.
Now that’s Confusion Corner!
I can’t wait to see what develops at this beloved intersection when I return for my 50th reunion 10 years from now.
