A-typical suburbs

Something that has been different about Phoenix that I’ve been meaning to talk about is how close all the suburbs are to Phoenix (and how close they are to each other).

Not that Lubbock really has what I would call “suburbs”, but Houston has places like Spring where you have to take a ride a good distance out on an interstate, and the Dallas / Ft Worth area has places like Plano, where you actually can have some fields or at least big swatches of grass and trees in between towns.

Not so with Phoenix, if you check it out on any of the online mapping tools you’ll notice that the grid of cross streets just keeps going even though the name of the area changes. The example I keep using to explain it, and it just happened today wouldn’t you know, is that you can often be driving down a street, and if you turn left is west Yorkshire road in Peoria, and on the right is west Utopia road in Phoenix. So most of the town just run side by side. So far I haven’t found any huge differences.

One thing that is definitely worth mentioning, the stop lights go from straight green, to straight yellow, to straight red and protected left green, and protected left yellow while still straight red, then red for everyone. In Lubbock it would be protected left green and straight red, protected left yellow and straight red, straight green, straight yellow, all red.

I’m told it’s the protected left first in some of the suburbs, but I’ve just started to really pay attention at lights instead of trying to remember and second guess.

Oh one more thing and this may be because I was driving a company vehicle with a big logo on the side, but I have noticed that repeatedly when I’m trying to turn in with traffic from a parking lot that’s near a stop light, people will stop to let me in. Thanks fellow Phoenicians.

Just this morning I happened to run across this article as to how to be accepted as a Phoenician. Apparently this town gets in 120,000 people a year, and I’ve run into three people in Lubbock who used to live in Phoenix. So “new comers” and “people who leave Phoenix” happens a lot.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/0108clay0108.html