Crawling up toward the Ellsworth Street Bridge at about 6 p.m. on Feb. 1, 2024.
Next time you’re in traffic waiting to get across the Ellsworth Street Bridge, shoot a quick glance at the green and white road sign on your right.
With traffic moving slowly, you’ll have plenty of time to check that sign. You will notice that it says “Spring Hill Rd.” Three words. Or I guess it’s two words and an abbreviation.
All over the place these days, including the Benton County website and Google maps, people have taken to spelling the road as “Springhill.” One word.
Which doesn’t make any sense. It’s pronounced as two words. So why not spell it the way it sounds?
If “Springhill” catches on any further, maybe pretty soon people will apply the same illogical rationale and start writing “Gibsonhill” and “Scravelhill” roads.
After you’ve looked at the road sign, which spells Spring Hill correctly, concentrate on exercising your patience if you’re there around 5 or 6 p.m.
As you already know, during peak hours it takes a few minutes to get across the bridge because of traffic congestion.
The city of Albany recently received a study that recommended several changes that might make traffic flow a little faster.
But like everything that involves state highways, it will take years for ODOT to bestir itself and carry out improvements, even if they require no new pavement or construction as in this case.
In the meantime, you can use ODOT’s Tripcheck cameras at Highway 20 and Spring Hill to check the intersection in almost real time. And if it looks congested, wait half an hour before starting your drive into town. (hh)
Hasso: There is no proofreading of anything anymore. That is all gone. And people can’t spell…especially men. And men are telling the sign painters what words to paint on a sign!!! Oh, sorry to say, you made a typo. No biggie, but it is kind of funny because it is in the story about the misspelling of Spring Hill. The typo is in your second paragraph, and it says “sowly,” when you meant slowly.
Thanks for pointing it out so I could fix it.
The same thing with SW Taylor’s Ferry Road. A few years ago I was entering my address online & it would not let me spell it in two words, how it always had been.
I don’t like it for the same reason you wrote about Spring Hill. I have noticed that since AI has been “assisting” with some news reports many words are misspelled or incorrect in their usage. Since I’m on this subject. I cannot stand it when almost everyone I hear saying the word supposedly all say it with Bs (supposably) .
Just needed to get that out of my head.
Just for fun. Do you know it is called Spring Hill Rd.? I do. Interesting.
OK, what is the origin of the name?
Spring Hill, is a hill located off of Valley View Dr and Kingston Way in North Albany, the road itself runs near the base of that hill
and at the base of the hill along spring hill rd there used to be a pipe tapped into the natural spring where people would stop to fill there water jugs
The traffic there is a pretty bad around that time of the evening. Surely it will be much better when they close that bridge for construction. Although raising the height of the beams above the road deck doesn’t seem to make sense since it is already higher than the regulation height of trailers allowed on the highway.
The Grammar Nazi’s have arrived…
Nah, no nazis my dear old Gordon.
Just more stooges! USA USA!