[Yesterday] – Pasco County Roads Suck
We got rained on pretty bad yesterday evening, to the point where it was coming down in buckets by the time I left work. The half-hour drive home was fine through Hillsborough county, but I could tell without even looking for the sign the moment I passed into Pasco … my nice, flat road suddenly became more full of holes than swiss cheese, thus leading to large pools of water in the roadway, skidding, and several times when I could’ve sworn I was going in the ditch even at 20mph under the speed limit. I can’t say that I wasn’t happy for that commute to be over…
[Today] – Yield != Stop
Several routes during today’s travels took us through intersections that required merging into existing traffic to turn right – one going into a ramp that merges into I-4 and the other coming off of I-75 onto SR-54 … why in heavens doesn’t anyone actually know how to drive through these things?! The first just started flailing his hands when I started honking because it was clear as day that there was no traffic coming and therefore he was yielding to nothing, and the second I don’t think ever got the clue … and there’s even a freakin’ sign coming off the freeway that says “Keep moving” along with the one that says you’re merging, but your lane isn’t ending. No yield sign, no stop sign, but I guess he sat there anyways just to take in the view…
[Tomorrow] – Daylight Savings Time == Bleech
Not much to say, except that I guarantee that I’m going to forget. I almost wish that they’d do these on Sundays instead of in the middle of the weekend so at least we’d get the excuse to show up late for work…
inre: yield signs
I saw the article on New Scientist, I think, but they did an experiment in Japan and discovered that the cause of most “traffic jams from nowhere” (the ones with no apparent cause, such as an accident) do, in fact, start with just one person. They had like 20 or 30 cars on a course, and told everyone to maintain speed and distance from the vehicle in front of them… and eventually one person slowed down just enough, and it caused everyone else to pile up. And that’s just with 30 cars.
No wonder Minneapolis/St. Paul traffic is so shitty. There’s LOT of on ramps and yield signs…
Yeah DSL fucked me over too, even though I KNOW I needed to get to bed, I was still up and jumpy at like 1.30 last night. 😛
1:30am? We were up until almost 3:30am!
Ouch! Better luck tonight!
There was an article in one of our local papers about that kind of thing last summer, too – I think it got ran in the heat of a lot of complaints to the DOT while they were rebuilding a major freeway to prove that it’s typically more the fault of a couple of drivers than the road construction itself!
I actually remember seeing a pretty cool java applet that depicted it, too – you got to choose the number of cars and trucks on the road, and the speed limits, and you could see where people not merging at highway speeds brought everything to a halt.