Allison had just moved to Chicago from Birmingham, Alabama. She had yet to change the registration on her Nissan Sentra so it still had Alabama plates. Allison had left her apartment in the Logan Square neighborhood on a Sunday morning at 4:00 to pick up her boyfriend, who was getting off work at 5:00 a.m. at a downtown Chicago hospital. This was the first time she had driven downtown to pick him up and while she found her way easily to the hospital, she realized that she was on the wrong side of the street to enter the ramp to the lobby.
Allison pulled into a lane of parked cars on the right and considered her options. Looking at a downtown map she saw that she would need to travel eight blocks south before she could turn around and get herself on the right side of the six-lane roadway. She looked both ways up and down the street and didn’t see a single car in any direction at such an early hour. She decided to just make an illegal U-turn and for some reason, she put on her left turn signal as she prepared to make the maneuver.
Before she could get her foot on the gas pedal, a loud voice boomed out over a loudspeaker, “Hey Alabama! Maybe you do that kind of stuff in Alabama, but we don’t do it here.” Allison almost jumped out of her seat. It was obvious that the loudspeaker announcement was aimed at her but where was it coming from? Then she spotted a marked Chicago Police Department patrol car in the ally by the hospital. A uniformed officer in that car had his hand out the window and was waving at her. Allison waved back and bailed out of her plans to make a U-turn. Allison was embarrassed by the incident and never made another illegal U-turn for as long as she lived in Chicago.
