![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pasitheaAh Highway 17. How I'd forgotten thy beauty.
This morning, traffic stopped in front of me. I leave enough space that I was able to stop but not true for the driver behind me. He zagged out of my lane into the next one but failed to notice that a truck was already using that lane to slow down. Made a nice crunch just to my right. Neither was injured. Both vehicles drove a bit further before pulling off to exchange information. Oddly this didn't frighten me at all.
OTOH, apparently 7:30AM is exactly the wrong time to launch. There appear to be a lot of wage slaves who have to be to work by 9. On Monday I left at 8:45 and got in at 9:30. Today I left at 7:30 and got in at 9:15.
Interestingly, most of the delay is not the 20 miles on winding mountain roads or highway 17. Rather it's the 10 miles of highway 85. People in San Jose apparently do not know how to drive at all. 85 is between 3 and 4 lanes wide with a commuter lane but it crawls along at 10 miles per hour despite the fact that it really doesn't have a lot of traffic density, merely incompetence. The fail seems to be in people's inability to merge correctly as it seems to be the interchanges and lane reductions that tie everything up. The major problems seem to be the people who are too timid to merge correctly and those who are self-righteous and jump queues, drive on the shoulder, and other whatnot. In the past two days I've seen more childish and road-rage behavior on the 10mile strip of highway 85 than I've seen in my entire previous YEAR of driving (admittedly, I generally avoid driving as much as possible, but still)
Glad I'm only commuting a few days a week and will be starting carpool on Friday. In the meanwhile, I'm going to do a little more study of best leave times and investigate alternate routes.
This morning, traffic stopped in front of me. I leave enough space that I was able to stop but not true for the driver behind me. He zagged out of my lane into the next one but failed to notice that a truck was already using that lane to slow down. Made a nice crunch just to my right. Neither was injured. Both vehicles drove a bit further before pulling off to exchange information. Oddly this didn't frighten me at all.
OTOH, apparently 7:30AM is exactly the wrong time to launch. There appear to be a lot of wage slaves who have to be to work by 9. On Monday I left at 8:45 and got in at 9:30. Today I left at 7:30 and got in at 9:15.
Interestingly, most of the delay is not the 20 miles on winding mountain roads or highway 17. Rather it's the 10 miles of highway 85. People in San Jose apparently do not know how to drive at all. 85 is between 3 and 4 lanes wide with a commuter lane but it crawls along at 10 miles per hour despite the fact that it really doesn't have a lot of traffic density, merely incompetence. The fail seems to be in people's inability to merge correctly as it seems to be the interchanges and lane reductions that tie everything up. The major problems seem to be the people who are too timid to merge correctly and those who are self-righteous and jump queues, drive on the shoulder, and other whatnot. In the past two days I've seen more childish and road-rage behavior on the 10mile strip of highway 85 than I've seen in my entire previous YEAR of driving (admittedly, I generally avoid driving as much as possible, but still)
Glad I'm only commuting a few days a week and will be starting carpool on Friday. In the meanwhile, I'm going to do a little more study of best leave times and investigate alternate routes.
