Yhis is a quinticential day in traffic in Hampton Roads!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

 

This is why I hate Hampton Roads!

OK, I am not from around here, a fact for which I thank the good Lord at least once a day.

DH got home from work today. We had a bill to pay & a book I wanted to buy, so we loaded the baby in the car and headed for Portsmouth to pay the bill. This is about half past four this evening.

Well, we were taking off from a red light, and the car sort of lurched into first gear (it's an automatic). Next red light, and it bumps going back into first. So DH says "Should we pull over?" Brilliant me says no, just come off the brake a little slower next time, and see what happens. He does, and it appears all is well. Well, we stop for a red light (we're on the outskirts of downtown this time, on a very busy road). He decides to shift into and out of park. I don't know why. He didn't have any problem shifting. The light turns green. He steps on the gas. The car goes "rrrrrrr." But it doesn't go. So he flips on the emergency flashers, makes sure it's in drive. No go. Shifts into park and back into drive. No go.

Now, keep in mind, this is a large city, a busy street, rush hour traffic. I'm from Texas. What do I think is going to happen? Well, I shouldn't, but I'm thinking, surely someone is going to stop and offer to help, right?

No. And that is why I hate Hampton Roads. The light turned green, and we weren't going anywhere. So immediately, the guy behind us starts honking. Yes, that's the cure for a dead transmission. And this keeps happening. He goes around. The next person to pull up behind us starts honking, angry because we're not moving. Umm, we're sitting here with the emergency flashers on, people.

So we get out of the car, and the baby and I make our way to the sidewalk. I really, really want to push the car out of the way. I don't like the fact that DH's car is sitting in traffic, really I don't. But it's not going anywhere. We can't safely move it, not with people doing about 40 mph on all sides of us (please note, the speed limit is 30 mph). So he lifts the hood and leaves a note in case the police come, and we start walking to a hotel about a block away.

It took us, I'll guess, about 5 minutes to get to the point where we're walking to the hotel. So, at a conservative guess, 75 people drove past us. On the street we were on, not on the cross-street. And the emergency flashers are on, and there's a giant puddle of transmission fluid easily visible, and we're getting out of the car and grabbing a baby and a stroller. So it's pretty obvious something's wrong. But there's not so much as an offer to call the police for us. Not so much as someone rolling down their window to say "Y'all need some help?"

This would not happen in San Antonio. How do I know that? Simple. I've had cars break down often enough. On the freeway, they might ignore you. On the surface streets, we wouldn't have sat there through one green light without someone stopping to offer help. No way there would have been the ongoing line of idiots honking at the car to get it to move. (I am especially in awe of the people who did this after we got out of it. What part of your brain can possibly be functioning when you are sitting directly behind a car with nobody in it, the hood up, and the flashers on, and you decide it will move if you simply honk long enough?)

But wait, it gets better.

We had just turned the corner of some little side street and were getting ready to walk up this incline to the Radisson, and we hear this crunch.

No, no one had hit Rob's car. Some brilliant woman had decided to run a stop sign, and she got hit by a truck. (And here I will note that rolling forward from a stop sign and blocking two lanes of traffic while trying to get across the third is an acceptable method of driving in this area; I've seen it too often to count. And the guy in the truck really should have seen her, since he was stopped, waiting for traffic to clear, shortly before he hit her. So it's not as if she drove out in front of a moving vehicle.)

Now, surely, people might pass up a disabled vehicle without stopping to offer help. But no way they would do this to vehicles involved in an accident, right? Wrong. DH went over to offer assistance as soon as he could safely cross the street (we don't just bitch about other people not offering help and then behave the same way ourselves). And the vehicles on all sides of the wreck immediately got the hell out of the area. Hey, the light was green. Can't miss a green light to make certain no one is injured, right? Unbelievable. How on Earth is it more important to get home quickly than to make sure one of your fellow humans isn't hurt or dying?

Well, thankfully, no one was hurt. Someone did come over to the scene to call police on his cell phone. He walked across the street (OK, ran, you don't walk across the street here) from the apartments nearby. And a woman in a Lincoln did eventually stop to offer us help, for which I was profoundly grateful, although I had to refuse, because we were still waiting for the police to show up for the wreck. I am thankful for that one person out of a hundred (at least that many had passed by when she stopped). But I still have a bitter taste in my mouth over the majority of the people here.

I miss home.

The end of this episode is that when they were done with the wreck, the police pushed Rob's car to the side of the road and called us a wrecker. So the car got towed to the wrecking company's compound--they didn't take Visa, & we didn't have cash--and we walked home. We were only perhaps 4 miles from the apartment, so it wasn't too bad. We stopped for dinner on the way, & it was actually a lovely night for a walk.

va=suck

4 entries found.

suck[1,verb]suck[2,noun]suck insuck-up

On December 27, 2007, Kajuan Cornish got the present he never wanted. And never expected.

"The officer who pulled me over said I was going too fast," Cornish says.  "Looked like I was in a rush."

Cornish says his reckless driving ticket might one day be funny, if it weren't so confusing.

"I get some people who laugh," he says, "and I get some people, like me, that are lost."

He reads his ticket out loud.

"Year?  None.  Make?  None.  Type?  Bike.  License?  None.  State?  None."

Cornish has to pay an abusive driver fee - he says $350 each year for the next four years - for a ticket he got on his lunch break.

So I turn and I go into the parking lot," he remembers, "and I get pulled over for recklessly driving on a bicycle."

Cornish is one of many people complaining about the fees, approved by the General Assembly and instituted last July.  The fees were expected to make the roads safe and bring in more money, but fell short on both counts.

"We need to focus on driver safety," says Governor Tim Kaine.  "We need to focus on funding the maintenance part of the transportation system.  This is just not the strategy that enables us to do those things."

Drivers like Paul Ferree say the more serious offenders like DUIs and road rage should pay up, but Ferree says the fees shouldn't apply to every ticket.

"To me it would depend on how abusive the offense is and maybe that person would be entitled to a more stiff penalty," says Ferree.

As the drive begins to change the abusive driver fees, there's still no way to tell which way the political car is headed - down the road to revoking or retooling the law.

Senate Democrats in the General Assembly considered the bill in the transportation committee before passing it on to the courts and justice committee. 

Why would a normal person have such a negative attitude about Virginia and specifically Hampton Roads?

 

   I have been in my countrys military service for well over a decade now. I have lived in Pensylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Florida and Virginaia twice. I have been to schools in California and Connecticut. I have visited Rhode Island, South Caralina, North Carolina, West Virginia, Colorado and Oregon. I have done port calls in Puerto Rico, Nova Scotia, Spain, Turkey, Greece, Bahrain and UAE. I have lived in Kuwait for 6 months. I think that I have a well rounded view of the quality of life in many places around the world.

   I don't think that I am generally a negative person. I have 5 beutiful children that I am very proud of. Three of the four in school are A and B students. One is a level ten gymnast. I am very much in love with my wife who is a sucessfull although relatively junior attorney. I am well decorated and have gone from the lowest enlisted rank to a mid level officer in my decade of service and hope to retire only a few ranks below Admiral. I'm sure I could go further at the expense of my spouses legal career, but won't. My personal motto has always been, "Attitude is 90% of everything!" Not the kind of person who gets down on a person or place easily without much justification.