Photo courtesy of Google Maps

The confusing, triangular roads in the neighborhood adjacent to LHS are the absolute worst.

If you take the back way to school, you may find yourself on the most treacherous stretch of road in the entire United States.  Sure, there are many crazy roads in the US.  Some are thin roads that wind above mountains where one mistake could send you hurdling off a cliff straight to your immediate death.  Some roads cut straight through deserts where running out of gas could leave you stranded to spend your final weeks wandering in the hot sun searching for water.  And finally, some roads are riddled with bandits and monsters, making the commute to Shell City nearly impossible.  But no road is more dangerous, more infuriating, and more ridiculously designed than those God-forbidden triangle shaped cul de sacs on Homewood Avenue and Elm Drive.

Back in the year 19-whatever when Sir John Libertyville was designing our great town, he obviously had to make the call on who designed the roads that would lead to the back entrance of the high school.  Now, we can all agree that John had done a splendid job with our town up until this point.  However, he must have appointed the single dumbest human on the planet to design these roads.  Instead of simple right or left turns, this person found it necessary to put a triangular patch of grass surrounded by thin roads barely wide enough to fit two cars side by side.  

Now the person who designed these streets must have looked at them at some point and thought: “Hmm, this may get a little confusing for drivers.”  But instead of putting any sort of sign indicating the rules of these unique roads, he found it best to leave these triangles vacant of all signs barring one which tells the speed limit.  So basically, if you choose to traverse these streets, you have no way of knowing if it is a one way or two way, who has the right of way, and which side of the triangle should be used to travel in a certain direction.  

Now, this all may seem pretty terrible, but trust me, it gets worse.  Every year in our great state of Illinois we have a season called winter.  In this season, you are probably familiar with a certain frozen precipitate called snow.  When snow builds up on roads, they can become slippery and dangerous, which is why we invented snowplows, and why we hire people to drive these snowplows around.  I have a tremendous amount of respect for these snowplow drivers, for they usually do a pretty great job.  But when it comes to plowing the ridiculous triangles, these drivers only clear enough snow for about a one and a half lane road.

Picture this: You are driving to school at 7:12 on a Tuesday morning in January.  It’s already snowing outside, and the roads are slippery.  You make it to the first triangle where there are cars going in both directions.  In order to make it to school, you must make it past the triangle, so you continue driving.  About halfway through, a plus-sized SUV decides to make its way down the same side of the triangle but in a different direction.  You and the SUV are coming towards each other, and there is no chance that both cars will fit side by side. You have two options: the first is to drive up onto the snow and possibly get stuck, and the second is to just bite the bullet and drive into a head-on collision going slow enough to hurt neither of the drivers.

 Unfortunately for present-day Libertyville residents, the person designing those roads by the high school did not think a regular, two-way street could have sufficed.  Clearly, random triangular patches of grass surrounded by narrow roads were the only options for that neighborhood.  But now, we have to deal with that every morning before school and every afternoon after.  In those back streets of Homewood Ave, a major road reform is needed.