The Motor City isnt so Auto-Friendly

If you have never been here, you may not know what I mean, but the traffic patterns around the city of Detroit, and as far as 25 miles north of downtown, are very unfriendly for cruising. The famed "Michigan left" is easily one of the most frustrating aspects of the roadways anywhere in the US.

What is a Michigan left, you ask?

Imagine that you are sitting at a stoplight on a random road, lets call it first street, and you are planning on turning left onto the crossroad, lets call it Main Street. You cannot turn left, so instead you have to go through the intersection, (generally a quarter mile or so) and drive into a "turnaround", which is nothing more than a small strip paved through the HUGE medians. You usually will have to sit at a light at the turnaround as well. You then turn left out of the turnaround, so you are now back on First Street, headed the direction from which you came. You then have to get all the way across to the far lane so that you may make a right turn, finally putting you on Main Street. So instead of simply putting in a delayed light and letting traffic turn left, you have now gone what is effectively a half mile out of your way, and you have made two lefts and a right, having sat at three stop lights instead of one.

Im not exaggerating.

Not only that, but in many cases, the stoplight at the turnarounds are VERY poorly timed, so when on the main road, you will often find yourself sitting, watching no one use a turnaround for long time, but these useless lights everywhere. It is as though the city has attempted to take as much thinking and judgment out of driving as possible, and in doing so they have made driving around Detroit an annoying series of dense traffic patterns.