Gary Has Been Waiting to Turn Left Onto Burnet Since Spring

The blinker on Gary's Corolla ticks at 112 beats per minute. He knows this because he taught middle school band for thirty-one years and cannot hear a repeating sound without counting it. He has been counting this one at the mouth of a side street off Burnet Road, somewhere between Koenig and Anderson, for what he describes as "a long movement with no rests."

"I'm going to the hardware store," he tells me, through the passenger window, with the calm of a man who no longer believes in hardware stores.

I have spent a Saturday with Gary. Gary has spent considerably more Saturdays with this intersection.

Early Life

Gary bought his house in 1994, back when making a left onto Burnet was the kind of thing you did without planning. You looked one way. You saw a Buick. You looked the other way. You saw a guy on a bicycle carrying a car battery for reasons he wasn't going to explain. You went.

Burnet then was a road built for errands. Auto parts, a vacuum repair shop, a place that sold both waterbeds and tax preparation, signage held up by faith and rust. The traffic moved like it had somewhere to be but wasn't going to make a whole thing about it.

"You could hear the neon at Top Notch from here," Gary says. "That's not true. But it felt true."

The Wait

The wait did not arrive all at once. It accumulated the way property taxes do, quietly, and then all at once when you open the envelope.

First came the mixed-use building on the corner, five stories of wood frame on a concrete podium with a ground-floor tenant that has been listed as "Coming Soon" since the Corolla had a functioning radio. Then came the building across the street, which is the same building facing the other direction, like a developer showed up with a mirror. Then came a third one, which the leasing banner describes as "Burnet's Next Chapter," as if Burnet had asked for a sequel.

Each one added a driveway. Each driveway added cars nosing into traffic with the specific body language of people who are late to a Pilates class they prepaid for in a twelve-pack.

Gary has kept informal records. On a good weekday morning in 2019, he estimates he got a usable gap every forty seconds. Now he gets roughly four a week, and two of those are canceled by a delivery van stopping in the bike lane to drop off a single envelope.

"Thursday the light down at Anderson glitched and I had six seconds of open road," he says. "I didn't go. I just watched it. Like a comet."

Influences

Gary credits his patience to John Philip Sousa, a lifetime of teaching beginning trumpet, and the fact that his left-turn signal is the only part of the car that still works perfectly.

He cites as negative influences the following, in no particular order:

• The robotaxi that sat beside him for two full cycles, also trying to turn left, also not going, both of them waiting for the other to blink. "It had better sensors than me. It did not have better judgment."
• The rideshare driver who pulled into the side street, stopped dead in front of him, and waited for a passenger named, according to the window, "Kaylee ☀️."
• The scooter rider who used the turn lane as a velodrome.
• Whoever decided the solution to a road carrying three times the traffic was a fresh coat of paint and a bus stop with a bench sized for one disappointed person.

He does not blame the people in the cars. They're all trying to get to a hardware store too, in their way. He blames the ones who approved four hundred new units on a corridor and then acted shocked, shocked, that the units came with drivers.

"Every one of those buildings had a traffic study," Gary says. "I'd love to meet the guy who sat out here and wrote 'manageable.' I'd buy him lunch. We'd have plenty of time to eat it."

A Note on Alternatives

People ask why Gary doesn't simply turn right, go down to a light and loop back. People who ask this have never seen what the loop has become.

Turning right puts him behind a woman trying to parallel park a Range Rover in front of a coffee shop whose menu is printed on a slab of walnut. Then a light that turns green for what appears to be a ceremonial reading of the green. Then a U-turn opportunity blocked by a sign reading NO U TURN, which was installed, Gary believes, the week he discovered the U-turn.

He has done the math. The right-turn loop takes eleven minutes. The left turn takes somewhere between ninety seconds and the heat death of the sun. Gary is a gambler at heart. He's choosing the sun.

There is also the bus, which Gary supports in principle and in his voting record. He took it once to the hardware store. It was great. He then had to carry a twenty-pound bag of potting soil back from the stop, past three leasing offices, each of which offered him a free cold brew in exchange for "just five minutes of your time."

"I gave the first one five minutes," he says. "They showed me a dog wash."

Public Life

Gary went to a city meeting once. He signed up to speak about the left turn and was assigned a number in the eighties. He sat in a plastic chair for four hours, then delivered his two minutes, which he had timed out at home like a solo.

He recalls the reception as "polite, in the way a dentist is polite."

Afterward a staffer handed him a card for a corridor planning survey. The survey asked him to rate, on a scale of one to five, how "vibrant" he wanted Burnet to feel. There was no box for "possible to leave my street." He wrote it in the margin. He used a pencil, because he's a teacher, and teachers know nobody reads the margin, but you write in it anyway.

What's Next

A fourth project has broken ground two blocks north, behind a construction fence wrapped in a vinyl banner of smiling people carrying farmers market tote bags, none of whom are visibly waiting to turn left. The renderings show a paseo. Gary is not sure what a paseo is, but he's fairly sure it has a driveway.

At about 2:15 in the afternoon, something happens. A gap opens. A real one: the southbound lane empty, the northbound lane holding at a red down the way, the Kaylee car gone, the scooters elsewhere, the robotaxi off contemplating its existence near Koenig.

Gary does not hesitate. Thirty-one years of cueing fourteen-year-olds on the downbeat pay off. The Corolla lurches into Burnet like it's sight-reading, crosses two lanes with grace and a slight grinding noise, and settles into the northbound flow.

I watch him go. The blinker is still ticking. 112. Right on tempo.

He calls me forty minutes later from the hardware store parking lot. He bought a single box of screws.

"Now," he says, "I have to turn left to get home."