14 DAY TRIAL // Sure, Bristol might be home to the world's first “bup stop” but, as it turns out, traffic is way more bizarre and chaotic in Virginia, US. Just check out the photo accompanying this article if you doubt it.
Those squiggly lines on the ground (yes, the ones that drivers are trying to make sense of and navigate) showed up on a local highway this past Monday, in the early hours of the morning.
Mind you, they are not modern geoglyphs. Oh, no. They are regular lines put on the ground along Interstate 66 in Fairfax County to mark and separate driving lanes.
Truth be told, the lines can't be blamed for anything. They did serve to separate driving lanes, and they did so honorably. Granted, the lanes they formed turned out to be oddly crooked, but this is a whole other story.
The good news is that the life of these wiggly lines on Interstate 66 was cut short by workmen, who spent the entire night replacing them with straight (and rather boring, some might want to add) ones, NBC New York informs.
By the looks of it, the peculiar lines weren't supposed to be permanent ones. On the contrary, they were temporary tape striping that was laid on the ground last week, and that got peeled and drastically altered its appearance due to traffic.
It is still unclear how and why the temporary tape striping was peeled from the ground. Then again, these little mysteries do not even matter anymore. What's important is that things were eventually sorted out, and that the crooked lanes did not lead to any accidents.
Still, it appears that, although drivers somehow figured out a way to navigate this labyrinth of squiggly traffic lines, many were left terribly confused and quite angry by the experience. Some even went as far as to describe driving conditions on this highway as “horrific.”
Others simply gave up on the idea of using this road, and settled on taking an entirely different route. “I had to bail off 66 and take the back roads to be able to get to work on time,” an unidentified driver told members of the press in an interview.
Folks with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT, for short) were quick to apologize for this little incident, and promised to make sure that nothing like this would ever happen again. It's still unclear whether or not drivers have accepted these apologies.
“We apologize profusely to all the motorists who have been negotiating the very unsafe and messed up lanes right around Centreville on 66,” Public Affairs Director Joan Morris said in a statement, as cited by WTOP. Furthermore, “We apologize for contributing to a lousy Monday morning on 66.”