OT - Near head-on collision

Feh. Sit-down machines are for sissies.

Who needs a machine? Try following me around the garden on a typical late April weekend. 20 hours of aerobics.

Exactly.

Sit-down machines make you good at...sit-down machines.

They bear little to the reality of every-day life. My clients stay on their feet.

I never understood that ethnic stereotype because so many people in my family are speed fanatics, and the only one to ever drive meekly is my mother, and that's only when she's in her monster truck and wearing her Jackie Kennedy first lady outfit. In college she had a street rod, and her mother would always rent a stick shift when she came here ("I don't know how to drive an automatic.").

It's different around here (upstate NY). Where do you live? Someplace where street racing's got a long & illustrious history?

Tthat explains why our friend Joe is in the NG most hours of the day and night, every day. He is even in here on holidays. LOL

If you'd stay away from the booze for a few days, you might have the kind of energy I do.

Holy s*it...you're drunk so early in the day?

He'll claim that it helps fight Alzheimer's.

If what you believe to be true were true, at least I will be sober tomorrow but you and Joe will still be a lefty kooks LOL

My mother did her racing while at UC Berkeley, and I live in Arizona, but I heard the stereotype in Los Angeles as well.

Well, there are worse stereotypes. But the thing is, around here, if I see a vehicle driving a certain way and guess who's driving it, I'm right about

Ooh. My turn. Prius story time.

Yesterday, I'm driving to the bank at around 3:00pm. The left turn pocket on the major street is a long one, with several cars within it.

The front car is, of course, a gold (!) Prius. The street's limit is

The rest of us had to wait through another cycle.

My son figured out that mistake in his first week of driving. Simple: It pissed him off when he was the victim, so he figured it was a good idea to not do it to other people.

There's more to it: Cars get zero mpg when idling at a traffic light. The Prius gets great gas mileage, but he forced 5-6 other cars to get zero mpg when they didn't need to. Asshole.

Bingo. I've always figured that if someone has to hit their brakes due to something I did, that's on me.

Effectively multiplying his "caused" carbon footprint. ( I really hate that term)

On that note, what about the municipalities that refuse to synch their traffic signals? Imagine hundreds of cars idling and spewing fumes so they can save a few cents worth of electricity by not running their sensor loops outside of rush hour.

Traffic engineers aren't the sharpest crayons in the box. For many years, the Long Island Expressway was an absolute disaster, and everyone who drove on it knew the primary reason: Idiots who don't know how to get onto a highway at the proper speed. It wasn't until the mid 1980s (IIRC) that they figured out how to minimize the problem: Group several busy exits into one. Wanna get off exits 52-55? You have to get off at one place, which puts you on a 55 mph service road, and that service road has individual exits. Those same interchanges include entrances to the service road, with enough "runway" that most people get the hint and get up to speed before they go from the service road onto the main highway.

How did they figure this out? According to my dad, they installed cameras. Duh. Only took 20 years.

North of me, there's a relatively small city called Encinitas. Their main street, El Camino Real, was always a pain to negotiate UNTIL they synched their signals.

Traffic flows very well, even during rush hour. Traffic engineers don't need to be smart to copy what works.

Very similar to the Austin, Texas area I visited last year. Imminently logical.

Some are slow on the uptake. I guess Texas does have some smart people, after all.

All these so-called engineers had to do was drive on the expressway and LOOK at what was going on.