Northbound 34th Street and University Ave. Bottleneck a Traffic Hazard

This article won’t be understood except by people who live in Gainesville or otherwise have to regularly drive around the city. It might be instructive to people moving to the area however in that it shows the City of Gainesville’s attitude toward it’s residents.

The problem I’m describing has to do with the northbound lanes of 34th Street on approach to University Avenue.

34th Street is six lanes south of the 34th and University intersection. North of the intersection, 34th bottlenecks into two lanes. This is where the natural bottleneck occurs and, for many years, that’s where the actual bottleneck occurred. There was only one turn lane west onto University Ave. and two lanes that went straight ahead, merging into one lane a little after the intersection.

This bottleneck was always a little annoying, but didn’t really cause any problems other than the bottleneck itself.

Then, several years ago now, the City of Gainesville, in the midst of one of it’s “beautification” projects, for some reason decided to alter that intersection.

They moved the bottleneck south of the intersection by making the left outside lane (formerly a through-lane) a turn only lane, making two lanes that turned west onto University Avenue.

To compound the problem, the actual bottleneck now occurs between 2nd Ave. and University Ave., a short stretch of road between two busy, but (typical for Gainesville) poorly synchronized intersections. On the right hand side, there is a busy commercial plaza and the outer right lane also becomes turn only.

The problem with all of this is that by the time folks in the outer lane realize it’s turn-only, it’s really too late to get over. They do, anyway, though, pushing their way into the middle lane ahead of people who were already in that lane to begin with. This results in a daily traffic jam in the middle lane because traffic cannot move smoothly due to the bottleneck.

Now, the final component of this problem actually causes accidents. (I actually narrowly missed being rear-ended in that lane yesterday; the car behind me was not so lucky.) On 34th Street, approaching the 2nd Ave intersection, there is a giant hill, that happens to crest right before the average end of the daily traffic jam.

The speed limit is 45 mph, so I think you can imagine the problem. Since Gainesville altered the configuration of the 34th Street/University Ave. intersection, rear-end collisions near the crest of the 34th street hill have become somewhat routine. What usually happens is that a car approaches the top of the hill at 45 mph, not seeing the traffic jam just on the other side. By the time the driver sees that traffic is stopped, sometimes he has room to stop, sometimes not; and sometimes, while he can stop, he ends up being rear-ended.

Congratulations, Gainesville, for making driving even more of a headache than it already was. Of course I should not be surprised, considering that the City of Gainesville hired as it’s senior city planner a man who WANTS to create more congestion.

Personally, I think anyone involved in a rear-end collision as a result of that bottleneck should try suing the City of Gainesville for contributory negligence in that they are maintaining a hazardous condition.

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Time Traveler Using Cell Phone In 1923?

I’ve been seeing reports around the internet that a time-traveling woman has been caught in a Charlie Chaplin film using a cell phone.

I don’t think so.

I’m not saying it’s not possible, and I will admit that, upon review, it DOES look like a woman (or a man in a woman’s coat and hat) talking on a cell phone. However, I just think it’s a case of temporal provincialism on the part of modern viewers combined with whimsy.

We all have cell phones, so when we see someone with mannerisms that we associate with cell phone usage, we might guess cell phones. However, guessing cell phones in 1923 is a lot like an African coming to America and, even being aware of American fauna, guessing zebras when he hears thundering hooves.

The cell phone crowd is guessing zebras in this movie clip. Think horses, people; be aware of your subject’s surroundings.

This Time article actually does a better job than much of the internet at looking at more likely explanations. http://newsfeed.time.com/2010/10/28/time-traveler-caught-on-film-were-skeptical/

Before declaring this to be a time traveler, I’d like a few more data points to base such a declaration on.

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Some People Are Just Looking for a Fight

Back when I was clerking at a local bookstore, I had to deal with all kinds of customers. If you’ve ever seen the movie Clerks, they were not exaggerating when they did a montage of idiotic customer behavior.

The kind of customer that really gets me, though, is the one looking for a fight. Sometimes, you can tell by their defiant body language, and their tone. But other times, it just comes out of the blue.

Anyhow, last week, I was in a video rental store and witnessed an exchange between a customer and the clerk, in which the customer belittled the clerk for not recognizing the title he was asking for.

I looked at the man and asked him how that was helpful? He acted like he didn’t understand the question and continued to pester the clerk.

I, myself, had to deal with a similar situation with a bookstore customer. I remember it well. A woman, after looking in the fiction section, asked me if we had anything by some popular fiction author–we’ll say Leopold Smith.

I asked “what does Leopold Smith write?” (I had gotten into the habit of repeating the full name back to a customer; guessing at personal pronouns had gotten me into trouble with the third-world authors that the really pretentious customers liked, and with the women authors whose names that could be men’s names.)

The customer looked at me with a look of utter contempt and said, “He’s only one of the most widely published authors in America today.”

Now, how was that helpful? She had asked me a question, and I asked her a followup question to get the information I needed to find the book in the store. Instead of giving me anything useful, she chose to belittle me for having tastes that differed from hers.

Well, I was in no mood that night, and responded that I don’t read popular literature, so I wasn’t familiar with the specific genre of the author.

You should’ve seen her backpedal. Now that she was on the defensive; she stammered that she didn’t say he was all that popular.

I could have gone on, but I had won, and there is a fine line that you don’t want to cross when it’s your job to make sure customers are well served and well-behaved.

But is still puzzles me to this day why people do that. Why would you belittle someone who is asking for information they need to better serve you?

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