The Vent and Rant Thread

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

Jeez louise. (pat pat pat) Now, go run that bubble bath.

Thanks.

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

You WHAT???

Can you contest it at all?

I called and asked right after I got the ticket and the lady at the courthouse told me not to bother. In this county, the judges are really gung ho and like to lay down the law. When my kids got their driving licenses, they had to go to court to hear a judge scare the dickens out of them about bad teen drivers. Frankly, setting rules at home like no cell phones while driving, etc., did more for them than a scary lecture. The ladies today were very sympathetic especially when I told them I hadn't had a ticket since I was 20.

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

We lived in Arkansas for a few years. The summers there were miserable. Blink, and you break out in a sweat.

At least here you only shrivel up and blow away in the oven furnace heat!

I will say that I think the humidity in Florida helped to keep the wrinkles at bay! Now that I'm in Virginia and have to deal with the dry winters, it seems like the wrinkles are really taking hold, of course, it could just be that I'm getting on in years.

[Wetdogeared]

Originally Posted by kazbates

What made the whole thing worse was that in addtion to the $30 ticket fee they charged me an additional $61 processing fee! CALGON TAKE ME AWAY!!!!@@!

Say...

What?

Only in Virginia!

"It's outrageous," traffic court attorney Thaddeus Furlong of Springfield, Va., told USA Today. "When Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class find out what they have to pay, there's going to be a backlash like you've never seen."

The new "driver responsibility tax" is part of the state's transportation funding bill by Del. David B. Albo (R-Springfield), which was signed into law in April by Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, to pay for more than $1 billion in state road improvements. "

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

So going on what WDE has posted, putting stop signs in weird locations is nothing more than a money making exercise???

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by Wetdogeared

Say...

What?

Only in Virginia!

I have a funny store about that fine. My family and I were taking a drive one afternoon shortly after the law went into effect. I was telling my husband about a neighbor who had been driving back from Tennessee when the minute he hit the Virginia state line, he noticed that anyone with a Virginia license plate hit their breaks to slow down to the speed limit. As my husband hadn't heard about the law, he asked me why the drivers from other states didn't have to slow down and I told him that, "the law was only for Virginians." My daughter Shannon piped up from the back of the van, "Which four?" At first, we thought she was kidding until I saw the perplexed look on her face. I think I laughed about that for the rest of the day. Thankfully, in her defense, she had only heard a portion of the conversation thanks to her Ipod, but we still give her a hard time about it to this day!!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by kazbates

That happened to us a few times when we lived in South Florida. It was AWFUL! Of course, the biggest problem was the humidity which you don't have to deal with since your heat is so dry and all. I always thought it was funny when people would say, "yeah, but it's a dry heat". Heat is heat and it's no fun when the digits on the thermometer hit in the triple digits.

Humidity does make a difference. My then employer sent me to New Mexico some years ago because we were opening a facility in Alamogordo, and I was part of the tech team making it live.

When they first told me I was going, I said "You want to send me to New Mexico in July?" I got there, and the heat was 90 - 100 degrees, but the relative humidity was about 15%. It was hot, but bearable. I called back home, and the SO said it was 90 degrees and 100 percent humidity, and she was dying. I thought "You know, I think I got the better deal..." (As long as all you ever wanted to eat was Tex Mex. There was a local Italian place whose idea of high cuisine was spaghetti with marinara sauce...)

One of my co-workers along on the trip loved cold weather. He said "People call me a polar bear, and think I don't feel the cold. That's not true. I do feel it. But when the weather is cold enough your fingers turn blue, I like that!" Mind you, this guy spent a couple of weeks of his summer vacation each year in Mexico with members of his church group, helping really poor Mexicans, in an area where the temperature dropping to 100 degrees was considered balmy weather. Don't ask me...
______
Dennis

[kazbates]

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

So going on what WDE has posted, putting stop signs in weird locations is nothing more than a money making exercise???

Pretty much. The sign is actually at a T intersection but in the 2 years I drove that road to take Ryleigh to her old school, I never saw anyone at the T intersection. The neighbors who live along the street are big complainers that people drive too fast down there and this was the city's way of slowing people down.

[Slite]

Originally Posted by kazbates

Pretty much. The sign is actually at a T intersection but in the 2 years I drove that road to take Ryleigh to her old school, I never saw anyone at the T intersection. The neighbors who live along the street are big complainers that people drive too fast down there and this was the city's way of slowing people down.

Yeah, dang those newfangled speedbumps... silly idea that'll never catch on!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by ShortNCuddlyAm

So going on what WDE has posted, putting stop signs in weird locations is nothing more than a money making exercise???

There are plenty of towns in rural areas like that here that are known as speed traps. The speed limit outside the town is 55. The speed limit inside the town limits is 35. The sign announcing it is deliberately obscure, and likely placed where you couldn't slow down fast enough if you did see and read it. And the local cop has his radar gun out, waiting to pounce.

It's a fairly major source of revenue.

Along similar lines, I grew up in the city of Philadelphia. The city decided many years ago that something needed to be done to cut down on double parking, and considered raising the fine for a double parking ticket from $6 to $25.

Problem 1: double parking was a way of life in largely Italian-American South Philadelphia, which was also the political power base of the then Italian-American mayor.

Problem 2: the city department responsible for collecting the fines said "If you do that, people won't double park as much, and we'll lose half our revenue!"

So they compromised, and raised the fine to $12. The city collected more money, the Mayor's constituents weren't unduly upset, and if you couldn't drive in South Philly because the double parking made half the streets impassable, hey, that was their problem...
______
Dennis

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by Slite

Yeah, dang those newfangled speedbumps... silly idea that'll never catch on!

In one of our local neighborhoods here the neighbors were complaining about all the speeding on the main access road and how they were concerned about being hit while walking on the side walk.

So, the "traffic calming" decision was to put speed humps (bumps) in.

After that, guess what... the residents complained about the speed bumps... so now they are taking them out.

Your tax dollars at work!!!

BOb

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

In one of our local neighborhoods here the neighbors were complaining about all the speeding on the main access road and how they were concerned about being hit while walking on the side walk.

So, the "traffic calming" decision was to put speed humps (bumps) in.

After that, guess what... the residents complained about the speed bumps... so now they are taking them out.

Your tax dollars at work!!!

BOb

Yeah I hate speed bumps. Better solution would be to issue bazooka's to the residents and have them "take the offending cars out!"

[Wetdogeared]

Originally Posted by pilotbob

...So, the "traffic calming" decision was to put speed humps (bumps) in...
BOb

New sub-divisions in our area were mandated to put in traffic circles at 4-way intersections instead of stop signs to "calm traffic" and slow down speeders.

After several drivers, speeding or not, plowed right through the traffic circles causing accidents, some fatal, the traffic circles were removed and stop signs erected.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Wetdogeared

New sub-divisions in our area were mandated to put in traffic circles at 4-way intersections instead of stop signs to "calm traffic" and slow down speeders.

After several drivers, speeding or not, plowed right through the traffic circles causing accidents, some fatal, the traffic circles were removed and stop signs erected.

[ShortNCuddlyAm]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

There are plenty of towns in rural areas like that here that are known as speed traps.

We do have speed traps in the UK - but it's speed cameras. You can suddenly find that one stretch of road has gone from a 70 to a 50 with just-visible speed cameras because there was one accident there in the last however long (and the accident doesn't, apparently, need to have been a speed related one )

Originally Posted by Wetdogeared

New sub-divisions in our area were mandated to put in traffic circles at 4-way intersections instead of stop signs to "calm traffic" and slow down speeders.

After several drivers, speeding or not, plowed right through the traffic circles causing accidents, some fatal, the traffic circles were removed and stop signs erected.

We had a roundabout(*) taken out near here a few years back - partly to prevent accidents, and partly to smooth traffic flow. Since then there have been more accidents and more congestion... The congestion is mostly down to very, very programming of the lights.

(* This was a proper roundabout with landscaping, not one of the tiddly little things painted in the middle of the road that it can be almost impossible to actually go around. If you'd tried to go over it, you'd've needed a 4x4)

[kazbates]

We have round-abouts or circles in Washington, DC. I invariably get stuck in one and have to make a few circuits before I can figure out which street I want to exit. I frustrates my navigational device to no end! You can almost hear the "hmpffff" in her voice when I miss the exist and she has to recalculate the route!

Our town has talked about putting round-abouts on one of the main roads to regulate traffic better. I remember years ago, the trend was to take out round-abouts.