Tag: traffic

FREE BEEF 2 I MEAN 3

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Y’know, I imagine anyone that knows me and my fascination with trucks that spill food all over Georgia highways might have thought I’d have been beside myself with excitement over the news of this wild story of a truck crashing on I-285, releasing nearly a hundred cows onto the busiest highway intersection in the city.  And for like two seconds, the thought is knee-jerk amusing, but then I come to the realization that unlike all of the other times where some dumbass truck driver overturns and spills their cargo all over the road, these are actually live animals, not processed consumables, and suddenly it’s not really that funny to me anymore.

Sure, every social media comic has a one-liner or a pun or fifty to share with the internet, hoping to get anybody to notice them, but the longer this story unfolded, and the facts began to emerge about how several cows died on impact of the crash, but then many more were running around wild, likely scared out of their minds at the chaos, it just kind of made me sad.

Now I’m not going to deny the fact that I love to eat meat, and just the other day, I pigged out on a litany of beef cuts at a Korean bbq, but I still have empathy for living things, even if their eventual destiny is to become the same beef that’s on the menu at the restaurants I go to.  Frankly, I feel a little better knowing that the cows that become the beef that I enjoy don’t have to live lives where they’re traumatized and put through a wild goose chase before they’re re-captured and sent to die anyway.  I’m not saying I want all the animals that become the meat I eat to be lavished in grapes and living in luxury, but I’d rather not them go through lives of torture either.

When I looked through some of the photos of the cows running around the Metro Atlanta area, there was one photo where the cops in the background were laughing; I get that it’s a unique situation and given the right mood and frame of mind, I might’ve thought it was funny too, but today it kind of irked me, because the cow that they had managed to wrangle was a fortunate survivor of the wreck, but really it’s just being accounted for because their meat and/or their milk has some money to make for someone else.

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Why are drivers with religious vanity plates the biggest assholes on the roads?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I feel like this is kind of a redundant question, and there’s a possibility that I’ve touched on this topic before.  Regardless, Georgia has no shortage of people who have vanity license plates on their car with subtle-to-overt religious messages on them, such as DOUPRAY, SING2HM, PRAY2HM, F8THFUL and so forth.  However, there is a correlation that I’ve noticed where the cars with the pious vanity plates are often the ones being driven by aggressive assholes and/or people with all sorts of uncharacteristically suspect accessories on their cars, from blackout plate covers, suspiciously dark tint, or any other things people put on their cars that one might not expect from drivers so god-fearing, they proclaim their piousness on their vanity plates.

And if they’re not driving like they’ve got something to hide, they’re usually the most aggressive and self-centered drivers on the road.  I really should keep a running document of ones that I’ve seen, and also notate which ones are being driven by assholes and/or equipped with less-than-reputable aftermarket accessories.

Just the other day, DOUPRAY was riding my ass hole on I-285 during horrendous rush hour traffic, as if it were me personally who were impeding their ability to get to Point B in their respective destination.  When traffic eased up after passing I-20 like usual, it took less than a second before the car whipped out of my peripheral vision into the just equally as newly vacated right lane, and blew past me going warp speed in order to pass me, and every other car that was still holed up in the left lanes.  It was here where I saw DOUPRAY on the license plate, and if their windows weren’t tinted darker than Wesley Snipes, I probably would have seen the face of some irate driver glaring daggers at me as if it were my personal fault they were stuck in traffic.

That’s where I re-realized the correlation between asshole drivers and those with religious vanity plates, and the revisiting of the question of why such is the case.  Is it because god-fearing religious people are all assholes?  Or is it because aggressive drivers believe their aggression is less suspect if they’re driving cars that have vanity plates that might make them appear more docile and religious AKA non-threatening?

All that it’s accomplishing in my eyes is that cars that I see on the road with religious-intonating vanity plates are automatically becoming perceived as combatant drivers who will probably be aggressive and inconsiderate the first chance they get, and it would probably behoove me to make the first moves and get in front of them, before their reckless nature puts my well-being in jeopardy.  Because when it comes to my own want to get from point A to point B, these religious assholes can worship their god plenty, behind me.

Upfront fares are what separates rideshare from taxis

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Some ≠ All: some lobby group of rideshare drivers are salty about upfront pricing and decide to stage a protest in Australia

The RideShare Drivers United (RSDU) don’t seem to realize that upfront pricing is the one thing that separates rideshare from taxis.  If companies like Uber and Lyft were to eliminate upfront pricing and price based on time and distance, they are literally, becoming cabs, except minus the obnoxious orange or yellow color of vehicle.

One of RSDU’s demands is that the ridesharing company stop using upfront pricing, and return to a system where drivers are paid for the actual time and distance traveled.

Yeah no, that’s probably not going to happen.

I understand their frustration, because I can’t help but feel bad for a driver I’ve hailed who gets completely stuck in stand-still traffic for 20 minutes, but are only going to make $24, because that’s what the app said they would make, but that’s the reason why I took them instead of hailing a cab or some other alternative mode of transportation.

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A challenger appears

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A different kind of fireball on the roadways: in a collision between tractor-trailers, one empties hundreds of mini-bottles of Fireball cinnamon whisky all over Interstate 40 in Arkansas

Normally I do my best to no-sell whenever somewhere outside of Georgia gets some sort of epic truck accident that results in a tragic amount of food all over the roadways, crippling traffic for hours, while crews have to work diligently and expediently to clear the road of random food and/or debris.  Often times, I’m envious whenever something particularly interesting is dumped out all over the place, and wish it happened in like Covington or Forest Park just outside of Atlanta.

However, in this case, aside from the most basic of white girl wasted cocktails most certainly catching my attention, it’s revealed that Arkansas has had its over veritable buffet dumped all over the highways over the last few years, possibly rivaling the sheer volume of wasted food done in Georgia.

Whereas Georgia has had a slightly more balanced menu scattered all over the roads with hams, chickens, cows, potato chips and numerous beer truck spills, Arkansas seems to go more for the college dorm diet, spilling frozen pizzas, and a whole lot of liquor all over their roads.  Allegedly there have been wrecks starring bourbon, gin and now Fireball cinnamon whisky stinking up the asphalt throughout the years.

Lord only knows how fragrant it might be at first, but as my brother points out, a little bit of sun and a little bit of heat, and I-40 in Central Arkansas is going to smell like unadulterated vomit not before long.

Either way, the magic is in the details, and a truck spilling whisky isn’t that much of a deal to me.  But a truck spilling hundreds of airplane-sized bottles of Fireball is kind of a tragedy, because god damn, does a Fireball-Dr. Pepper cocktail really taste delicious, regardless of how much of a basic white girl that would make me to admit to enjoying.

FREE BEEF

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Haven’t done one of these in a while: tractor-trailer hauling live cattle overturns on Interstate 75 in Cobb County, Georgia, liberating several cows that systematically mangled the morning rush to levels worse than usual, until they were corralled and moved to onto the side of the road.  Seven cows did not survive the wreck. 😞

Now I don’t really take lightly the unfortunate deaths of animals, but considering what cows are typically raised for, I think it’s safe to assume that FREE BEEF has just been added to the menu of the buffet spilled across the highways of Georgia.  And frankly considering the typically inhumane ways that animals are put out of their misery before they become food for us mostly worthless humans, dying in a car accident might not be the worst way to go for the bovines lucky enough to escape their eventual destinies.

As I said, it’s been a while, so I don’t even know where to begin searching out my last list of food lost on Georgia roads.  All I can really point out that with fresh beef finally entering the fray, joining chickens and hams, the only meat that has yet to represent on a highway is like some salmon, catfish or some other form of seafood.

But if that day ever comes, then Georgia roads can be the Arby’s of the United States highway system, since they’ll have had, all the meats.

When in doubt, change the name, make logos

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

That’s the Atlanta way.  Or rather, announce news that declares some grand unification of transportation agencies in order to mask that some other umbrella-shell company is being created that will pay off a whole lot of new people for doing jack shit.

Fresh on the heels of my last post where Google put a spotlight on the unintentionally-official meaning of MARTA comes this news that Georgia is going to create a regional transit governing system that will oversee the mass transit authorities across the entire Metro Atlanta area; including MARTA.  The solution?  A new name!

The Atlantaregion Transit Linkauthority, or The ATL!  And they invented new words in the process because they don’t know how acronyms work!

In other words, the goal on paper is that supposedly by 2023, all buses, from Cobb’s CobbLink, Gwinnett’s GRTA, MARTA, and any other regional buses in Clayton or DeKalb will all be re-branded ATL buses.  All MARTA trains will be re-branded ATL trains.  The ATL transportation options will hopefully be consolidated under one brand and identity, with the theory that it will supposedly actually help boost economic viability.

What’s actually going to happen is that by 2019, the teats of all these regional transit authority will be milked by a few people who came up with this brilliant idea, they’ll make a lot of money, by 2021, The ARTLA will be all but forgotten 2022, Cobb and Gwinnett will still be afraid of black people and oppose the rebranding of their buses and in 2023, MARTA will still be MARTA, GRTA will still be GRTA, Cobb will still be vehemently opposed to black people, and Google will still spit out Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta in their queries for the meaning of MARTA.

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Too distracted to enforce the distracted

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Georgia Senate approves House Bill 673*, outlawing motorists from holding their cell phones while operating a vehicle AKA the stop fucking texting while driving bill.

*behind paywall, but just hit the stop loading button before the paywall script popup has a chance to load to read content anyway because fuck myAJC

That’s great and all, but it’s going to be completely meaningless when no cop in the state is going to bother enforcing this law.  Unless they’re extremely bored and want to do work to pass the time and/or they’re targeting minorities.  One of my best friends works in law enforcement, and every time I have questions about “is X illegal?” the answers are almost always yes, but with a disclaimer that it’s basically discretionary on the officer to whether or not it’s worth the effort to tie themselves up with menial violations when there are bigger fish to potentially fry.

And considering Georgia’s lax discretionary ambivalence about HOV lane violators, blackout license plate covers, jaywalking, and other seemingly innocuously negligible yet illegal misdemeanors, HB 673 seems destined to be as useless as most of these other laws, because if nobody’s going to bother enforcing it, what’s really the point?

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