#920 I See Roads

The relatively large snowfall in the Olympia region lately has led me to assess the efficacy of recent “traffic grant” toys installed by the various road departments.
I’m really happy about the Washington State D.O.T. road cams. You can go online and look at the road conditions at about anywhere along the I-5 corridor. I was able to see there was no snow in Tacoma the other day when there was 4 inches in Olympia. So since I had to go to Tacoma, I bulled through to Dupont, then it was clear sailing.
But while I was bulling through, I noticed a couple of things. First, traffic lights need to be set slower when it snows. By the time one skidder gets traction and gets going, the guy behind him has to hurry too much to make the light.
Which led me inexorably to my second first hand observation: Traffic islands suck. I suppose they don’t suck when they save people but they sucked for me personally when one of my first cornering attempts went out of control. I slid around a right turn and ended up straddling the narrow curb-thick traffic island meant to delineate the left turn lane of the street I was turning into.
I couldn’t back up so I straddled it for a hundred feet hoping like heck I wasn’t ripping something out of my undercarriage.
Speaking of under. Those pedestrian lights they embed in the pavement like a YouTube video? Cants see ‘em under four inches of snow.
And you know those stanchions that the pedestrians have to walk between to set off the lighted pavement crosswalk? The electric eyes in them are too sensitive. One where I live also flashes an upright sign. And the falling snow kept interrupting the beam of the electric eye and setting the damn thing off like a strobe.
It was so distracting I didn’t pace myself into the last of our recent great traffic improvements—the roundabout.
Or as I like to call it, the skating rink.
I’ll never see the expression “why don’t you take this baby for a spin?” quite the same again...
America, ya gotta love it.