The Tongue of Cherry Avenue

Typical of Charlottesville, when you turn onto Cleveland off of JPA, the road jerks to the left and becomes Cherry Avenue. It's very confusing. But typical.

Not quite so typical is that at this jerk or jag or curve, whatever you want to call it, two other roads jut off, one which is a dead end, and may also be called Cleveland (hard to tell), and the other is Willis, which runs into Harris (sounds like a British joke in there somewhere). It's not the safest intersection in the world, because it's not really an intersection. There's a pedestrian crossing that only two of the roads affords vision of, making most pedestrian activity in this area risky at best. For drivers, there's the confusion of the turning road which is the same road but now a different name compounded with the stress of other traffic from two others roads and that sort of vague question mark lingering around a memory of a driver's test that didn't seem to cover much other than speed limits around trains and schools.

So several months ago, the city built a 'tongue' of concrete that cropped off some of the access of the dead end road. The effect of this was to make it a little bit safer and less confusing if you were staying on Cherry/Cleveland, but if you were turning onto Willis, there were some harrowing moments when oncoming traffic looked threateningly close.

But I got used to it. THEN, a month or so ago, the city started to dig up and cut off the tongue. Rumor has it that "the neighborhood" didn't like the tongue. They protested, and the city said 'oops' and took it back.

I have several questions and problems with this scenario:

1) I have no idea why the tongue was installed in the first place -- but if there was good reasoning behind it, why was it removed?
2) Who is 'the neighborhood'? I'm in the neighborhood; I didn't have a problem with the tongue.
3) Is it really so easy just to complain about something the city has done and have it removed like that, so swiftly and perfunctorily? Is it??
4) How much did this thing cost?
5) Why doesn't the city install a three-way stop or something else instead of willy nilly adding and removing concrete tongues?
6) Aren't there more pressing items on the agenda for traffic issues that should take precedence over this ridiculous juncture? Just up Cherry, for instance - right before it randomly turns into Elliot - the city's been messing with the timing of the lights, so that traffic is stuck on Cherry, and they've installed more concrete to keep drivers from getting in the left lane too soon. It's a bum rap and very annoying. Why not stick a tongue there? I definitely feel like sticking my tongue out when I'm suffering in traffic, watching the light blip on and off at a higher speed than my Adelphia cable internet connection.