The Mad Dash

Complaining about other drivers seems cliche, let's be honest. Today, however, I feel compelled to. I live near a major road that, just a few years back, wasn't. When I first moved here, it was a two lane suburban street. The problem was that it lay along a proposed route that would connect a very important part of Jacksonville to another very important part of Jacksonville. Portions of this route had already been built, with some on top of preexisting infrastructure while others were purpose built for the remaining leg.

Seemed like a good idea to the traffic planners.

Aside from the one purpose built leg, most of the route runs through neighborhoods, sidewalks bordering its asphalt flanks, with well delineated (though I think narrow) bicycle lanes. The speed limit for most of this run is 45 mph, typical for most suburban arteries in such settings, with a small 55 mph segment through a less congested area, then back down to 45 for the remainder.

Of course, nobody drives the speed limit anymore.

But this route has gotten almost dangerous.

Wait; strike the "almost".

Today, as I drove home from work, I found myself doing 55 in the long 45 stretch. I was in the left lane, preparing for my left turn, and while I normally don't like to speed at all, not doing so in this situation is foolhardy.

The trouble is that people were passing me, in the right lane, at speeds that were probably closer to 70. If they were simply going around is one thing, but they maintained these speeds and that slot until they disappeared down the road. If it were one or two people is one thing, but this seemed to have been almost every single one of them today.

And if it hadn't been for the rain, chances are they would have encountered bicyclists a little further up the road. Indeed, they may have, beyond my turn off.

Which brings me to another terrifying moment.

I have to make a left turn into my neighborhood where there is no light. This means crossing the two westbound lanes. Gauging the speed I need to cross the remaining lanes should be easy, assuming that the oncoming traffic is doing 45 mph. Which, of course, is not the case. Just like the eastbound jets, we now have westbound jets, also moving along at speeds greater than 55. This is the flow I have to go with during my morning commute, when my thirty one hundred pound Volvo 240 wagon is still warming up.

As anyone can tell you, getting an older station wagon up to speed is hard enough, let alone one that weighs in at a ton and a half. Then, not even a third of a mile up, I have to get into the left lane to turn off (I take a different, though parallel, route in the morning). In other words, I have to scoot my one and a half ton elderly grande dame of a car into the left lane, where many a frustrated test pilot seems to be living, all the while being pushed by others.

It can be argued that I wouldn't be having this problem if I were to buy a newer car, perhaps a lighter one. Yes, that'd be swell, except, of course, I live and die by the adage "buy new, wear it out, make do or do without". Besides, if people were doing the speed limit, or even just a little over it, this would not be a problem; my car is quite capable of speeding along, it just takes a little time to get there.

But this is just crazy. Forget coffee, my morning adrenalin rush is provided by my fellow drivers.

I could so go into how this seems endemic of a society that lives faster than it should. I won't.

Though I just did, of course.