Tag Archives: beltway

The injustice of the month club…

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Oh good. As expected, we just couldn’t let the truck protest have it’s time to shine in Canada. According to The Hill, there’s a plot afoot to bring traffic on the Washington beltway to a halt. 

As someone who spent a portion of his career commuting into and out of DC on a daily basis, let me just say fuck directly off with that asshattery. The only people you’ll be screwing with are the working schmucks who just want to get home and get on with their lives – exactly the kind of people I’d think you would want to support your little protest, no?

Of course they are, but deep thinking never seems to be among the traits displayed by people who plan this kind of goofy ass protest. Thinking in broader strategic terms is a game for grown adults rather than those whose notion of how to go about doing things was stunted around the time they were 17-year-old. Truly they’re almost always driven and supported by the kind of people I don’t even bother arguing with – or engaging with at all if I can avoid it. I just don’t have the patience anymore to suffer fools with anything less than complete disdain.

Look, I know I’ll never be mistaken for any kind of man of the people. That’s fine. It’s good that I’m not king, though, because given my preferences, I’d pull back and nuke this shit from orbit. But we live in world where even the village idiot is allowed to have a voice and we’re legally obligated to allow him or her to use it. So do what you want to the beltway and tens of thousands if commuters, I guess. I can only hope you turn every single one of them into opponents of whatever grave-injustice-of-the-month it is you think you’re trying to highlight. 

The art and science of the commute…

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I think of myself as a fairly seasoned driver. I cut my commuting teeth on the DC beltway, it’s safe to assume there isn’t much traffic can throw at me that I haven’t experienced before. A 90 minute delay because the drawbridge was open? Check. Snow-induced gridlock on 95? Done it. Five hour office to home drives because a tractor trailer hauling gasoline fell off an overpass? Yep. Run a line of red lights at 5 AM on Pennsylvania Avenue in Southeast because certain unsavory characters got a little too close? Did that too. Snow, sleet, hail, rain, wind, all manner of natural factors have conspired against my daily commute at one point or another and I’ve bested all of them.

It’s been a long time since I’ve run the beltway gauntlet and you’d think that living in the backwoods of Ceciltucky would leave me free of most of the urban and suburban commuting hazards I faced while fighting my way into and away from the District every day. Commuting is an art and a science, but the one thing making the drive down 95 every morning prepared me for was the complete asshattery of the people who stop in the middle of the road during a driving rain storm. I don’t mean that they slow to a crawl. I mean they come to a full and complete stop right there in the travel lane as if nothing could have prepared them for the sight of liquid falling from the sky.

Look, if you need to pull off to the side and wait it out, good on ya. God bless. But for the love of Pete can we at least agree that stopping in the middle of the road, when by your own actions you’re admitting that visibility is less than ideal, is a very bad idea? And if, for some unknown reason, you do feel compelled to stop in the middle of the road, how about cutting the rest of use a break and flipping on your hazard lights so we have a fighting chance of seeing you before your cute little toy car becomes my hood ornament. Yeah. That would be just great.

Oh. And I had to drive over a tree today. A tree. Right there in the middle of the road. That was a first in 19 years of being a licensed driver. Surely that adds something to my cachet as a recognized power commuter… like earning my “Rural Living” merit badge.

Some days leaving the house serves no purpose other than reminding me why I do it as little as possible.

A Fine Commute…

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I’d like to personally extend a heart-felt fuck you to the Asshat Construction Company that somehow managed to find a way to keep the Beltway closed until 6:30 on a Monday morning. What project manager decided that was a good idea? Did you somehow miss the eight goddamn miles of traffic that backed up while you were still on site? Did you think the massed phalanxes of headlights were a glowing tribute to your job well done?

Now, I understand the Wilson Bridge is a choke point on 495 at the very best of times. On weekends and during rush hour it has a tendency to become something of a slowly rolling parking lot. Oh, there was a detour; a detour in the form of shunting southbound traffic from a four-lane highway onto an exit ramp and then back onto the highway via the accompanying entrance ramp. Someone apparently forgot to go to class the day they were teaching traffic planning at engineer school.

I understand the company will be fined $50 per minute for the delay, for a whopping total of $4500. I could have a little more respect for this kind of punishment if the fine were even $500/minute. To a firm of that size, a $4500 fine is something akin to keeping $1 from junior’s allowance this week. Sure, he’ll notice at the time, but a week from now he’ll have forgotten about whatever it was that he had gotten in trouble for in the first place.

For those of my readers living in Western Maryland, I want you to imagine taking a drive from Hancock to Frostburg with the heaviest traffic you have every seen… I mean literally bumper to bumper, moving a few feet per minute with the occasional breakout to 5 miles per hour. Imagine this backup started at Rocky Gap. Now imagine that the cross-town bridge was closed and every bit of traffic from 68 was being diverted through downtown Cumberland and the Narrows into LaVale. Now imagine the total drive took you three hours. That should roughly approximate my morning.

Mr. Project Manager, congratulations! You’ve won the first ever Asshat of the Week Award. I’ll see you in hell.