I learned to drive around the DC beltway, which has traffic that make midwesterners quiver with fear. I have driven for years around the Hampton Roads area, where the military personnel and families hail from all over the nation, again traffic which truly make a driver into sterner stuff than seen elsewhere. I have ridden a rickshaw through Bangalore, India, which completely revised my definition of the word "congestion". All this< I believe, lends me some degree of credence and experience with which I can authoritavely state the following:
Bostonians can't drive worth a damn.
Granted, it's not altogether their fault. The byzantine labyrinth of streets in Boston and the surrounding areas are enough to confuse someone skilled in navigating the streets of DC, no mean feat in and of itself. And there are numerous places where (most likely during hairpin curves and merging of intersections) the lane dividing lines will disappear altogether, leaving you to wonder where exactly you are supposed to be driving. And let us not forget the Big Dig, created to ease congestion and make traffic flow through Boston with the grace of a ballerina. Even with the closure of parts of the road (fortunately beyond where we needed to go, towards the airport) I cannot imagine what things were like to convince the powers-that-be such measures were required.
As it stands now, things might be better with either gas prices of $15/gallon, or tolls on every road in & out of the city. Or hell, just ban cars altolgether and make the use of public transportation mandatory. (That being said, in all fairness it would seem that the Boston metro area gets far more use out of their public trans system than the DC metro area does. IMHO, of course.)
OK, enough about the traffic. I'm still a little stressed after spending an extra hour on the road, all locally, trying to figure out my freaking way back to the bloody hotel. So, next post: Why my feet hate me right now...
Bostonians can't drive worth a damn.
Granted, it's not altogether their fault. The byzantine labyrinth of streets in Boston and the surrounding areas are enough to confuse someone skilled in navigating the streets of DC, no mean feat in and of itself. And there are numerous places where (most likely during hairpin curves and merging of intersections) the lane dividing lines will disappear altogether, leaving you to wonder where exactly you are supposed to be driving. And let us not forget the Big Dig, created to ease congestion and make traffic flow through Boston with the grace of a ballerina. Even with the closure of parts of the road (fortunately beyond where we needed to go, towards the airport) I cannot imagine what things were like to convince the powers-that-be such measures were required.
As it stands now, things might be better with either gas prices of $15/gallon, or tolls on every road in & out of the city. Or hell, just ban cars altolgether and make the use of public transportation mandatory. (That being said, in all fairness it would seem that the Boston metro area gets far more use out of their public trans system than the DC metro area does. IMHO, of course.)
OK, enough about the traffic. I'm still a little stressed after spending an extra hour on the road, all locally, trying to figure out my freaking way back to the bloody hotel. So, next post: Why my feet hate me right now...
No comments:
Post a Comment