Tag: traffic

Doesn’t calling him a vigilante admit he’s upholding the law?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

vig·i·lan·te, n.

  1. any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime.

So, some guy in Florida (of course) was busted by the FCC, for having a signal jammer in his car, that effectively made it impossible for surrounding motorists to use their cell phones while in the moving range of his signal jammer.  He was fined $48,000 for interfering with wireless communications

Translation: some guy, tired of people ignoring the oft-unenforced cell phone use while driving, took the law into his own hands, and used a signal jammer to make it impossible for motorists within his vicinity to fuck around on the cell phones while driving, thus making them safer, less-distracted motorists.  He was fined a large sum of money for doing what the law wouldn’t do: something about it.

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It’s not every day people jump out of moving vehicles

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This morning, it took somewhere around 90-100 minutes to get into work, capping off a truly horrendous work week of bad, lengthy commutes.  Atlanta traffic is pretty bad in its own right, which is obviously no secret to anyone, but five straight days of abysmal commutes is enough to drive anyone insane.

However, the circumstances to this morning’s bad commute were different, and erred a bit into the extreme, as it was revealed that the nature of what many believed was just a typical bad accident turned out to be a frightening tale of a person jumping out of a moving vehicle and subsequently getting hit on the highway.  Subsequently, all lanes of the highway were shut down, causing a massive delay that I happened to be in.  But it’s also scary to think that if I were even ahead of schedule by anywhere from 2-4 minutes, I probably could have witnessed the incident, or worse, been the car that hit the person after they jumped out of a moving vehicle.  In that regard, I guess a long-ass commute doesn’t seem so bad in comparison.

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Well I’ll be damned

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Long story short: House Bill 459 passes, declaring that it is now a misdemeanor to be puttering down in the left lane on a divided highway.

In other words, it is now a ticketable offense in the state of Georgia to be cruising in the left lane when there are faster cars that would like to pass.  When this bill was initially proposed, I didn’t think it really had any chance to actually pass, as there was too much gray area, too much subjectivity, and too much room for error for it to be a viable law.  It took pretty much an entire calendar year, but not only did it pass, it passed with a landslide margin of 162-9.  Apparently, a lot of legislative talking heads are really passionate about the ability to drive without Driving Miss Daisy clogging up the left lanes.

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Nothing (realistically) can be done about it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Impetus: Atlanta Regional Commission proposes ideas that would cost about $59 billion dollars which could theoretically alleviate traffic.

I hate to write about it every time something like this comes up, but there’s something about the topic of Atlanta’s incessantly horrendous traffic that sets me off.  Maybe it’s because so often times is the case, I’ve suffered a particularly bad morning of traffic when I get to work and eventually begin reading the news, there’s something about the fair city’s bad traffic that just aggravates me.

Anyway, the posted link is basically a story about how some probably likely crooked bureaucrats want nearly 25 years of a boatload of money to do a whole lot of nothing AKA attempt to “solve” Atlanta’s traffic woes.  It’s not that I’m deliberately trying to sound pessimistic towards the idea of alleviating traffic, it’s just the fact of the matter, conclusive and succinct is that Atlanta traffic is unsolvable, and that nothing short of changing the topography of the entire city, destroying existing, and creating an entirely new, actually planned, road system and implementing an efficient and planned mass transit system, would actually help.

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Time to cease believing in karma

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I had a bad day yesterday.  The irony in that statement is the fact that the day was neither good nor bad until I decided to go do a good deed, only for just about everything about it to blow up in my face and effectively make me feel that the day was now a bad one.

Seriously, from a supposedly “shouldn’t take too long” task ending up taking close to two hours of my life I’ll always feel to have been permanently wasted, which then put me into the perfect time frame to be in teeth of Atlanta’s perpetually idiotic Interstate 20-related traffic nightmare, all while it was raining; can we cut it out with the fucking rain, world?  I think we get the point that global warming or whatever weather-related scientific downfall was all our fault, and that we’re subject to spontaneous shit weather, but enough of the rain.

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Somewhere, something has gone terribly wrong

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

This picture was taken at 7:10 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday morning.  I am roughly 3.5 miles away from my final destination, and it will take me 30 minutes to traverse a stretch of road that would ordinarily take just under four, if traveling at the legal speed limit of 55 mph.  It is not the fact that this was exceptionally bad that serves as the impetus of this post, it’s the fact that this is absolutely ordinary that it does.

Actually, that’s not entirely true, because I’ve seen endured it worse before, many, many times.  These electronic signs scattered insufficiently throughout the outskirts of the Metro Atlanta area are harbingers of dread and symbols of ineptitude.  15-17 actually isn’t bad, as it’s usually 24-26 most of the time, and if there’s absolutely any precipitation, it’s 38-40; the general rule is to add 10-12 minutes to that, which is a more accurate estimation.  And if there’s an accident, it’s guaranteed to occur right under the sign, so that there’s absolutely zero chance of you knowing there’s an accident in advance and detour, and that you’ll see the sign just as you’re approaching the calamity.

Just once, during a particularly bad morning, I’d like to simply see it say “YOU’RE FUCKED.”

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Are there any other cities like this?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I was sitting in traffic the other day, which is a fairly common occurrence to those that live in Atlanta.  Whenever this occurs, inevitably, I, or someone like Jen often asks “why is it always this bad?”  The question is pretty redundant, because we all know the answer to it, but it’s partially frustration and partially the fact that there’s really nothing else to say when you’re stuck in suffocating Atlanta gridlock.

Aside from the sheer lack of surface streets leading to a massive reliance on the highways, if you were to ask me, I’d tell you that the biggest problem causing Atlanta traffic is simply Interstate 20, which slices neatly through the middle of Atlanta, going east-west.  At three points in the Atlanta highway system does I-20 intersect, and at any given point during the day (or night), those will inevitably be the worst points of traffic.  The I-85/I-75 connector probably gets it the worst in both directions on a daily basis, but the west intersection of I-285 and I-20 is notorious for predictably horrific traffic, especially for those traveling southbound; it’s incredible how people needing to travel westbound on I-20 manage to choke out and congest four lanes across 10 miles of roadway on a daily basis.

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