Dover Township Jug Handles Promote Safety

                               By Joseph A. Lypowy

     The renowned writer-philosopher, G.K. Chesterton once wrote, that there are two types of reformers, and he used an analogy to describe between the two. The first set of reformers were going down a road and came to a fence going across the road preventing passage. This group said amongst themselves, what kind of fool would build a fence across a road?, so they tore it down immediately. The second type of reformers handled the situation in this manner. When they encountered the fence across the road, they reasoned that maybe whoever put the fence across the road must have had a good reason for it, so they sought out the purpose of the fence before knocking it down. After their investigation they learned that the fence was built across the road because, just beyond is a cliff and it was erected to prevent travelers from going over it.
     The lesson of the above story is, that you don't dismantle or destroy things until you first find the reason for it's existence first, and in many cases, there is a good reason for it, but there are people who want to dismantle things that appear to not make sense , only because they do not understand it. The story of the reformers remind me of certain groups of people in Dover Township who have been talking about removing all the jug handles on Route 37. This movement has been circulating for the past couple of years. The pundits of removing the jug handles say that the jug handles are non-rational, inefficient means of making a left-hand turn. The only problem with their argument is that the prime purpose of the jug-handles is to make safe U-turns on highways divided by meridians or dividers, especially for tractor trailers and large trucks with a wide turning radius. You see, our genius friends, would prefer to see 50 ft. tractor trailers making jack-knife hair-pin U-turns in the middle of the intersection, or utilize Joe-Joe's Hot Dogs or the local gas station parking lot to make its maneuvers. The secondary benefit of jug handles is for vehicles to make safer controlled turns reducing head-on collisions. You can also say that the jug handles also provide open space, water retention basin locations and small sanctuaries for wildlife. Some of the anti-jug handle pundits also belong to the Jethro Bodine school of logic which say's " If we get by without jug handles in the backwoods of Tennessee
, we can do it here too". Some of the anti-jug handle fervor might even be partly fueled by local real estate moguls convincing impressionable politicians that they are loosing tax ratable, all the time picturing another Eckert Drugs or Tiger Mart on that wasted open space.
      believe in considering alternative roadway designs on new or future construction projects, but I think it is completely unconscionable for people to actually propose spending millions to rip up Route 37 because they have some festation with jug handles, when the State says there is not enough money for more urgent projects such as modernizing Route 9, Route 166 and constructing new bridges.

Joseph A. Lypowy
Dover Township