Turtle Carnage

I'm not from this part of the country originally.  I'm from Wisconsin.  There are no road turtles, or Bott's Dots, in Wisconsin.  Wisconsin has lots of very large, frequently-used snowplows, which do not play well with road turtles.

Road turtles vex me.  I have grown to appreciate their third dimension during our wet winters when the more traditional painted lines are obstructed by the sheen of the wet roads.  As a bicyclist, however, I strongly dislike them.  When affixed to the roadway, I often find myself weaving through them as if avoiding landmines.  I'm also equally horrified to discover road turtle carnage that has made its way to the side of the street, into the bike lane or shoulder.

There's no sense in trying to get public works or DOT to use something else, though--these hunks of plastic do more good than harm.

I've often thought that it would be good to carry around a small hand broom for broken sweeping broken glass out of the street as I encounter it on my bike rides, but I hadn't thought seriously about getting one until I started finding turtle fragments.  In an ideal world, our public works departments would be street-sweeping all the time to keep our bike lanes clean, but in challenging economic times, we have to improvise and help out a bit ourselves.

Photo credit: horsesass.org