Kalamazoo has a section of road that I absolutely detest. The road in question is at the foot of Eastwood Hill. It’s East Main Street as it drops with an almost twenty percent grade downhill. The reason why I hate this section of road so much is because just to the left, as you are going downhill, there is always (or at least it seems so) a cop waiting in the unused parking lot just in front of the DQ on the corner of East Main and East Michigan. What makes this road so awful and uniquely suited to attract cops? The entire downward slope is set at 25 miles per hour and the cops are very fond of detecting oncoming cars with radar and pulling them over if they were in excess of this limit.

For those that are wondering, yes, I did get caught going 35 down the hill. It’s an evil hill because to go down it at 25 you have to chew up your brakes the whole way down. This got me to thinking about alternatives to this route, heading downhill. I started to explore the local roads and discovered that if I select Humphrey Road instead of East Main to make my way downtown I have three choices to make from that point and they all have minimums of 40, except for one which doesn’t matter. If I turn on Bixby then I’m guaranteed a red-light-signal which may or may not give me clearance to make an easy left onto Gull Road and head downtown. If I don’t do that, I can run to the end of Humphrey and brave a left onto Gull from that position further along, it’s more dangerous because there is no controls on the flow of traffic on Gull Road from there. Another path I’ve found is to turn right and head into the residential areas. If I turn right on Charlotte, then I can turn left on Bridge Street and that has just one dangerous intersection. The safest path is Bixby with the light, the quickest is actually a split between the end of Humphrey and Bridge Street.

Throughout all of this it bears noticing that I never once suggest following East Main downtown. It’s just not worth the trouble. The worn out brakes, the aggressive cops and their speed traps, or the stop light that always seems to catch me at the most time-consuming parts of it’s cycle. As I traverse these roads every morning I get to thinking just how much that particular section of East Main is kind of a taboo section of road now. Nobody should use it, it should be a one-way heading away from downtown. That would eliminate the brake wear and make it that much harder for cops to set up their damned speed traps. It’s much easier to have to scale a hill starting out slow, noticing the cop, and progressing slow with an assiduous use of the accelerator pedal instead having to endure watching dollars peel off your brakes as you use them up to slow yourself down.

If anyone else who reads this blog likes this intersection, all you have to do is get caught once in the speed trap and you’ll change your tune. If the city turned the entire affair into a one-way, that also would solve the issue. One can hope.