Oh, great! Transportation Department depending on junk mail to make intersection work

We can all sleep a little easier tonight, except for those thousands of you that flow through the intersection of Preston Road and Legacy Drive. And, according to this story, that's about 80,000 vehicles a day.

The Transportation Department has spent some $2.5 million of your tax money to reconfigure that intersection so that drivers cannot make a left turn. So, if you're driving west on Legacy and want to go south on Preston, you're going to have to go north on Preston instead. But only for a little while. Then you get to make a 180 to start traveling in your intended direction. It's called a Michigan left turn and I'm told it works magnificently up there where they have to make these U-turns in snow and ice a lot more often that you will. (I say "you," because I see absolutely no reason for me ever to be at that intersection.)

There are going to be signs up there telling people what to do, which will be absolutely worthless -- Texas drivers don't read road signs (i.e., "keep right except to pass," "do not cross double white line," any speed limit sign), or, if they do, they simply ignore them. But the Transportation folks had a backup notification plan: they notified drivers through the mail (how they identified the proper addresses is beyond me). So here, according to Mark Pettit, a Texas Department of Transportation spokesman, is the determining factor on how successful this Michigan left turn gambit will be:

"It really boils down to whether people threw away their junk mail," he said. "I hope they read it."

Yessiree, we can all sleep a lot easier tonight.