mindstalk | buses (Reply)

Maybe you can shed light on a recent change in how an intersection near my Somerville house is painted.

Following some recent road work they moved the stop lines much further back from the intersection. Following my total inability to correctly estimate what fraction of our lot is occupied by the house, I'm not going to guess at distance, but it's far enough that you really can't get a view of traffic on the cross street, *and* it makes me nervous as a bicyclist to be in front of the line of cars for a left turn lane because the bike is slow enough to accelerate that I know the longer distance without being able to turn out of the way is going to slow every body down, and I really try not to do that. I was mystified and annoyed by the new setup. Sometimes they post traffic cops, who don't always make the most helpful calls, too.

For a while, I was kind of rolling my eyes at the whole situation, and when taking a left turn from the higher traffic road onto the lower traffic road would pull up to where the stop line used to be. Then one time as I was doing this, a bus pulled up from the cross street on the left and leaned on its horn. My first reaction was "WTF", and then I gradually realized that it needed to turn right (onto the street that I was trying to turn left from), and that somehow, with the way the intersection is laid out, I was occupying the space that the bus would need to sweep through as it turned. So I picked up my bike and moved it. I guess that's why they moved the stop lines so far back?

Anyway, now I can't figure out how the intersection worked previously, and also I continue to be frustrated by being forced to stop so far back from the actual intersection. Are you at all familiar with this kind of change in how the streets are paint? Any context you can provide?