The good people of Clarksville, Tennessee, seem to love making pieces of infrastructure into local heroes. I’m all for it. Years ago, a particular guardrail there was repeatedly driven into, and so “Gary the Guardrail” was named and celebrated. Gary’s Facebook fan page appears to no longer be online, but “Rhonda the Roundabout,” a new traffic flow feature in town, has been thrust into the spotlight thanks to a live-streaming traffic camera that captured the crazy antics of people who got lost on it.
Clarksville is northwest of Nashville, just below the Kentucky border. Rhonda is the new intersection of Whitfield Road and Needmore Road. It’s so new that Google Maps still shows it as the regular old intersection it once was.
To me, this does not look so unusual. And indeed, local news Clarksville now reports that traffic was mostly flowing without incident. “Most people know how to navigate these obstacles, but if they don’t know how to do it, it only takes a few to cause a traffic jam,” David Smith, director of the highway department, told the outlet.
So why are we even talking about it? The traffic camera I mentioned – which you can see here – apparently caught people confused and driving the wrong way and, even more strangely, Round. As of Thursday, August 8, Rhonda’s Facebook fans have achieved the top three “high scores” of 50 laps (gray SUV), 25 laps (three motorcycles), and 21 laps (red pickup truck).
Surely these people were just having fun or wanted to test the new asphalt. European Holiday Mood. Is anyone reading this old enough to remember the movie?
Anyway, back in Tennessee: Rhonda opened just two days ago on August 6th and already has its own Facebook page (5,500 members at the time of writing). There’s even a theme song that was probably created using artificial intelligence, but still somehow pops. It’s at least as good as any pop-country song of the last decade, right?
Time to fill up the truck, hit the track and drive around Rhonda until you throw up. Damn, that could be another verse!
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