I have lived in Belgrade since 1991, and I have learned one fundamental truth about the human condition: people cannot merge. If you cannot merge in a grocery store aisle or a hallway, you certainly cannot merge at a four-way stop on a Tuesday morning. It is a miracle that more of us aren’t currently bumper-to-bumper in the living rooms of our neighbors.

My wife, Sharon, says I am becoming difficult to live with because I keep trying to implement traffic calming measures in our kitchen. She wants to reach for the coffee grounds, and I want her to yield to the toaster. I’ve even drawn a chalk circle on the linoleum to demonstrate how a mini-roundabout would streamline the flow of breakfast preparation. She told me to go outside, so I went and stood at the intersection of Main and Jackrabbit for forty minutes just to feel something.

The problem is that everyone wants to be first, but nobody wants to be the one to actually commit to the turn. We sit there in our trucks, staring at each other through the windshields, waiting for a signal that is never coming. It’s polite, I suppose, but it’s also inefficient. If we just installed a permanent concrete island in the middle of our high-traffic zones, we wouldn’t have to look at each other at all. We could just keep moving in a gentle, predictable circle until we reached our destinations.

“It’s just a house, Gerald,” my neighbor Gary told me yesterday while I was measuring his driveway for potential sight-line obstructions. He doesn’t see the bigger picture, but that is fine. When the rest of the valley finally decides to gridlock permanently, I will be the only one with a clear path to the refrigerator.

Gerald Fencepost has lived in Belgrade since 1991 and has strong feelings about most intersections.