A Bridge to Nowhere

When I was just a wee little commuter back in the 70's (I'll be 44 this year) I can remember the mood in the Seattle area being pretty dark. Boeing had a huge financial crash at the end if the 60's dropping their number of employees by 70% by 1971. That prompted two real-estate agents to put up the iconic "Will the last person leaving Seattle – Turn out the lights" billboard. This is the world I was born into. I can remember seeing half built housing developments all over, and lots of family friends struggling or moving away.

Sometime during that period they had begun building several freeway ramps and as the tax base dwindled so did those projects. Those ramps remained unfinished and loomed over the downtown drive for many years reminding everyone of leaner times.

We travel every day across an elevated section of freeway called the Nalley Valley Viaduct. In the last year or so they have begun a huge project to replace and expand this inadequate interchange. Traffic suffers on all approaches to this area and it really does need the work done.

The project is truly ambitious. They are just in that stage where several of the ramps are half built and I can't help but think back to my childhood and those bridges to nowhere. Considering our current economic woes and the country being involved in a long running controversial war I get a really odd nostalgic feeling as we travel through there.

All that aside, I am actually quite hopeful for the work that is being done. Generally speaking my experience with large freeway construction projects has never been good. They always seem like half measures that manage to keep construction companies employed but never go quite far enough to solve the problem. I-405 for instance has been under major construction near the S-Curves for as long as I can remember. Literally by the time they complete one upgrade or alteration it is already obsolete and they start all over again.

I have to say I was really reaching that point in life that I could say I was getting my "curmudgeon on" for large freeway projects. That's when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge project came into my life. If you aren't familiar with this bridge you may know it by its infamous name, Galloping Gertie.

When I first met Tammy and found out she lived in Lakebay my response was "Umm, Washington?" Then she clarified by saying, "Key Peninsula" and I replied, "Umm, Washington?" I had been out that way before on my way to Shelton and happily ignored all the place names in between. On our second date I volunteered to make the trek to her place, meet the parents, receive the obligatory dog piling from their vicious pack of toy poodles, and get a feel for where she lived. I thoroughly enjoyed the trip, but it wasn't long before I started to get a taste of their pain dealing with SR-16 and "The Bridge".

After Gertie fell into the Narrows they replaced her with a new 4 lane bridge. As more people moved to growing areas like Gig Harbor the bridge became a strangle hold choke point that caused waves of delays all the way back to I-5. It was clearly time to come up with a Heimlich maneuver effort. Washington's typical underwhelming effort wasn't going to be sufficient. Then I heard the words Toll Bridge and despair set in.

We watched the bridge go up and I cringed with every brick and beam. Finally the day came for this monster to open and it was as if someone had punched the Narrows in the solar plexus. Tammy likes to say that SR-16 went from the worst part of her commute to the best, and that's saying something. Frankly it's the finest capitol project I've ever even heard of. The new bridge returns 20-30 minutes each day to us.

I still get M.A.S.H. flash backs when we drive through the new construction and probably will until those bridges grow into overpasses. I'll even continue to get the occasional vision of Speed launching the Mach 5 off one to safely land on another conveniently placed surface street. That car was shaped like a lethal weapon! He wore a 5 point seatbelt and helmet while Trixie bounced around in the passenger seat like a crash test dummy. That cartoon was awesome. Do kids even watch cartoons anymore? Eh, I guess with DVD players in the Family Truckster the stuff going on outside the window doesn't rate.

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

It’s all about U

The drizzle was, well dismal. I'm not sure if that qualifies as a rhyme or not. Anyway, the trip in this morning was grey, dreary… Oh sorry, winked out for a moment.

I'm a quad tall 120 degree non fat latte guy. That gets my day started off with a bang. It makes 5 am much more tolerable. I do my best not to get behind the wheel without my coffee. It's understandably difficult to gather statistics about the dangers of driving while drowsy. There isn't a breath test for sleepiness and you aren't likely to still be all that drowsy when you are propped up against the guard rail, steering wheel imprint on your chest and glass in your head. Dizzy maybe, but drowsy no.

With that in mind, here's my assertion, reading probably isn't the best choice of things to do while operating your motor vehicle in a commute. Why is it then that the DOT thought it would be a good idea to put reader boards up along the freeway? I understand that these boards have great potential to provide vital information to motorists but I'm wondering if this delivery method is really the answer.

My skepticism comes from having this experience repeatedly. I'm sitting in a 2 mile, 30 minute delay on I-5. It's been a long day at work and I've worn a whole in my scalp scratching my head puzzling over corporate decision making skills. I'm watching my gas mileage shrink to near zero as I spot the reader board sign up ahead. I think to myself, "Ah, an accident, gee, I hope everyone is ok." As the text of the sign comes into focus, my rear end clinches tight enough to permanently fuse the cloth covering of the driver's seat to my big man jeans. "TEST TEST TEST ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ!@#$%^&*()" is repeated over and over on the sign. 20 feet after we clear the sign, we are back to 60 MPH.

Yup, I'd put billboards, particularly the giant football stadium scoreboard versions, right up there. The Emerald Queen Casino did a fine job of placing their latest incarnation of this device right in the view of southbound I-5 traffic. Hey, who would be bothered by a few fender benders when compared to receiving the scintillating news that The Emerald Queen has the finest Thai entertainment in town! (No kidding, racial profiling is all the rage when advertising to potential gambling addicts).

While we are there, let's talk about people waving signs on overpasses. People, nothing is going to annoy your target audience more than causing a traffic jam and catching them in it. Allow me to pick on Casey Treat and his Christian Faith Center following. Folks, read your Bible and have a look at the definition of Agape. When I think "love in action" causing a traffic jam, or worse a car accident, isn't the image that comes to mind. I'm excited to meet Jesus too, but somehow I don't think dying in a ditch fully engulfed in an 87 octane blaze is the method he has in mind. Please, stick to Sunday morning TV and stay off the overpasses. Really, please, I'm begging you.

Whew, I feel better. I think I'll get another coffee.

This morning the reader board over SR-16 had a single letter on it, "U". See, it is all about me! Hah, I told you so!

Don't drive angry! Drive weird!

PS –Shorter today, just because Surendra complained.

Recycling Resusci Anne

I should have put on Jimmi Hendrix or The Doors this morning; it would have matched the sunrise perfectly. I love the picture below. The smoke stack goes well with the skyline in a William S. Burroughs sorta way.

I was once asked the following question in a job interview, "You are stuck in traffic and are running late for a meeting with 'the big boss'. You are a key presenter in the meeting. The HOV lane is wide open, what would you do?" The interviewer said that the best answer he ever got for this question was "Find a homeless person and offer to hire them as a carpool buddy"! We agreed that it was a pretty good answer.

If the state of Washington they are considering turning the HOV lane on i405 into a HOT lane. I've read some of the articles on the proposal and I'm baffled. I can't help but see this as yet another effort by the state to use their new favorite phrase, "Generate Revenue". The recent economic woes caused our state's lawmakers to go into immediate Eeyore mode predicting the worst possible scenarios as certainties. They looked at the books and said wow we are going to come up short. I don't know about you, but when facing a shortfall in our home budget, the first thing we do is look for ways to cut back on the non essentials.

Luxuries go first, followed by comfort, and then necessities. There are a range of possible cutbacks in each one of those buckets, but you get the idea. We don't go after essential services first, what kind of sense would that make? Yet, across Washington State, and I'm betting much of the country as well, that's exactly what our Government appears to be doing. They start out with "Well, we'll just have to let inmates go free" or "I guess we'll just layoff some police". Shortly after publishing these doomsday proclamations we began hearing wild rumors like taxes on gum, candy and bottled water. Not much time passed before I-960 was suspended and it is now open season on "Revenue Generation" tactics.

Ok, so $.01 tax on each ounce of bottled water, cutting into my Juicy Fruit addiction, and raising prices on my Mars Bar, all exceedingly silly but manageable. It will only amount to people cutting back on those purchases, harming the industries that produce them (damn those bottled water companies!!!) and in the end the reduction in revenue from the commerce will outweigh the taxes raised, but ok, I can set that aside. Here's the piece I don't get about converting the HOV to HOT. One of the suggestions is increasing the requirement to 3 people to use the lane without a fee.

We (Tammy and I but really all of us who live in the Puget Sound and commute) re-arrange our lives around those HOV lanes. We chose the times we travel, where we live, and ultimately what jobs we pick. Screwing around with those lanes hits too close to home. For folks that are closer to the margin than Tammy and I, these changes might be devastating. How does that possibility balance with the kinder, gentler, group hug politics we practice in this state? The truth is, the economy is bad, and money is tight all around. If the people have less money, guess what? The government has less money. It sucks, but that's what it is.

The bottom line is that everything I've seen so far targets those folks closer to the margins. That being said, there aren't any other revenue generating solutions that make sense either. That's the root of the problem here. Our elected officials need to stop talking about "Generating Revenue", stop threatening us into compliance by holding up the specter of cuts to core services, and start dealing with reality.

I'm going to make a suggestion here, radical as it is, but perhaps we need to prioritize until the tax system we already have in place recovers along with citizen's incomes? So before we talk about programs like emergency response and road repair we make sure that we pause spending on non essentials like

• Parks
  
• Art (Like the fine shovel in dirt statue)
  
• Landscaping (not talking about erosion control)
  

Deep breath now, I know some of you would die for art and parks. I'm just asking that for now you not make that choice for the rest of us. Things will get better, and the money will return. When it does we can go back to spending money on square rocks. In the mean time perhaps the folks in Olympia might turn off their cell phones, send their publicists and campaign managers home, get a white board and make a some lists. In the end I bet there's a whole mess of things that could be shelved for a while in lieu of sending Troopers to the unemployment line or jacking up the price of my Cheetos.

Don't drive angry. Drive weird!

PS – Resusci Annie, or Rescue Annie is the CPR dummy I used to learn to inflate people made of plastic and rubber. We are considering a recycling program for these devices that allow them to be used as a 3^rd passenger in case they up the number needed for the HOV lane.