Solving Mount Pleasant’s Traffic Dilemma In a Round-About Way

September 1998

Solving Mount Pleasant’s Traffic Dilemma In a Round-About Way
By Bob Coskrey

Looking at that intriguing, yet daunting, round-about construction on Mathis Ferry Road, which appears to be, at least, one of the ways Mt. Pleasant plans to sovle its rapidly worsening traffic problems, started me thinking about some solutions of my own, and I think I may have hit upon one: By controlling the quality of the people driving into Mt. Pleasant, we can automatically decrease the quantity.

With a system of directional signs at Mt. Pleasant’s three entrances, the Silas Pearman Bridge, the Mark Clark expressway, and Highway 17 North, followed by a series of the aforementioned round-abouts, we could not only control our driver quality but perhaps even improve it.

First of all, of course, we need to establish some standards for the type of people we want driving through our still-barely-hanging-on-to-the-word-pleasant community. On the other hand, that sounds too authoritarian, and I would end up by excluding myself, besides it’s easier and a lot more fun just to tell you whom we don’t want to be driving on our hallowed highways and roads. It’s also very convenient that I already have a prepared list of drivers identifiable by their behavior or sometimes just their appearance that I have complied over my 40 tortuous years of driving, and it is my contention that these kinds of motoring miscreants are most likely to cause traffic difficulties of one type or another.

The following is a short list of the people I feel we should target:

1. Those with any kind of personalized license plates, including those ego-inflated politicians with their emblazoned “Number Ones,” not to mention the self-important members of such vital entities of the state cosmetology board.
2. Men whose machismos are bolstered by driving around with their left arms hanging out of their windows.
3. Men 50 years of age or older driving convertibles.
4. People with obnoxious, plain stupid, or just way too many damned decals on their vehicles.
5. People with multiple dents in their font bumper, a clear indication of a tailgating personality disorder.
6. People with rear window decorations made from plastic 6-pack bolders or a mass of stuffed animals.
7. Drivers with dogs on their laps.
8. People driving Camaros or Corvettes.
9. People too short to see over their steering wheels and make no attempt to resolve the problem.
10. People who drive around constantly talking on their cell phones.
11. Men who continually observe life’s mundanities out the side window instead of watching where they’re going.
12. Last but not least, the proprietors of fuzzy dice.

How will it work?

When these individuals arrive at our entrances, they will be halted, identified, and directed by qualified police to lanes marked specifically for the above categories of driving deviants, and because we don’t want to have too many lanes, they will be shared by more than one category, naturally being careful not to create mixtures of mutually antagonistic groups, such as Camaro driver and people unable to see over their steering wheels, or the Confederate flag decal displayers and the “Free James Brown” ones.

The lanes will lead to the specially designed round-abouts, which will not only utilize their intrinsic ability to confuse and befuddle, but being augmented with electronically controlled revolving lanes, which will spin vehicles several dizzying times before shunting them off to “Driver Rehabilitation Centers,” where they will be directed into huge lots by female parking attendants wearing orange traffic cone bras over their shirts and male attendants wearing orange traffic cone dunce caps and perhaps one other strategically placed smaller one (an attempt to bring a bit of levity to what could become an abysmally sobering experience).

From that point, they will follow signs to building marked for each category of unqualified driver, where they will receive on-the-lot counseling or some other mode of behavior or appearance rectifying the situation.

For example, those with personalized license plates will receive counseling to raise their limp egos to the point they won’t need to rely on obnoxious pronouncements, such as “Missy’s Miata” just to make it from one day to the next; or they may even be asked to use a transitional tag, which reads, “I am secure in the knowledge that no one cares who I am.”