Those who know me know that I fully intend to one day take over the world. Have no fear, though, for I shall be a benevolent ruler. For the most part. I do, however, have a list of a few new rules that people will have to learn. If you use common sense in life, these won’t affect you too much; they’re mostly to compensate for much of the idiocy I see in the world around me. This post is dedicated to a subset of those rules that pertain to driving and roads.
Rule #1: All road names must be unique. I live in Atlanta. In Atlanta, approximately every third street is named “Peachtree”. Peachtree St, Peachtree St NE, Peachtree St NW, W Peachtree St, Peachtree Rd, Peachtree Blvd, Peachtree Dunwoody, Peachtree Industrial, and about five hundred thousand other examples. I find that this happens a lot. Especially in subdivisions. Do you ever notice that? Go into a subdivision or relatively self-contained neighborhood, and you’ll see that most roads have the same name. The post-fixes may be different, but the main portion of the name always matches. This just defies all common sense. Road names mean the most to people who don’t know the neighborhood well and are following directions, and when driving around in unfamiliar territory, the driver doesn’t need to be driving around at half the speed limit because you have to pay special attention to the tiny-print postfix of the road name on the signs. Ideally, the postfix shouldn’t even be necessary (and many times isn’t given in directions). Anyone who gives road names more than a half a second of thought should realize that road names are meant to unambiguously label the roads and that the most important part of a road name – the part that people pay most attention to – is the main part, not the postfix. Therefore, for a road name to do its job, the main part must be unique. Can there be two Main Streets? Sure. But they had better damn well be in different cities.
Rule #2: The same road may not have two names.
Assume you’re on a road. Let’s call it “Brian St”. At some point, you have turned onto Brian St and begun to drive down it. After five minutes of driving without turning off of that road, what’s the name of the road you’re on? Common sense tells you that it’s Brian St. Why? Simple: common sense tells you that a road is a single entity, and if an entity is given a name, then the name belongs to the whole thing. I see evidence to the contrary all the time, though. I often get directions of the form, “Turn onto X St. Go 5 miles, and it will turn into Y St.” I don’t think so. It’s not two roads. It’s one road. One road should have one name. Sometimes one road starts off as two roads, and at some point in the past they were connected. To them, I say, “Tough luck”. When two streets are joined end-to-end, they become one street, and they should therefore have one name. It can be either of the two original names or a whole new name. I don’t care how, but the newly created longer road must have exactly one single name. I know it may cause a little confusion for a little while, but that’s better than causing confusion for years and years to come. Sometimes we just have to grit our teeth and bare it.
Rule #3: No Street Parking.
The presence of street parking really confounds me. To think that you can be driving along in the right lane of a road, pull a little farther over to the right a few feet, stop the car, get out, and leave it there absolutely defies all common sense. To be clear, I’m not against parking in designated, marked spaces for parallel parking that are made onto the road. Those are spaces and do not belong to the driving lane. However, driving in Atlanta, I have many times been driving in the right hand lane (or left hand lane on one-way streets) only to have to slam on the brakes and switch lanes because there’s an unoccupied car in front of me. To me, the reasoning for this rule is so obvious that I can’t think of a way to explain why it’s needed. If fact, it shouldn’t be needed. Roads are for driving on. Each lane should be drivable. You’re not supposed to just stop your car in the road and get out, even if it is the lane on the end. And yet, people do it. Constantly. And they don’t get it trouble for it. Entire lanes are persistently blocked off because people leave their cars in them. I’ve even seen this on two-lane roads! Two-lane roads are reduced to a single lane with traffic going both ways. These people shouldn’t get away with it, but they shouldn’t get tickets. They should get rear-ended by a semi, and it should be treated as their fault because they stopped in the road!
Rule #4: No bicycles in the road within city limits.
There will be a lot of people that don’t like this rule, but it’s needed just the same. To put it another way, bicycles should be treated as people, not as automobiles. I’ve heard the commercials on the radio that, to paraphrase, say that you shouldn’t get mad at bicyclers on the road because they have the same rights as cars do. Well, that may be true legally, but what is legal and what is right are two totally different things. It may be legal for cars and bicycles to share the road, but it shouldn’t be. Why? Because cars and bicycles are in two very different classes. A bicycle/rider combo can weight around 200 lbs. and go anywhere from 0 to 30 mph. during normal use. A car can weigh 2.5 to 3 tons and go anywhere from 0 to 80 mph. Now, honestly, should those two things go together on the road? Honestly? Of course not. First, the bicyclist is moving significantly slower than the flow of traffic, and that’s going to cause problems by either: a) slowing down the rest of traffic, or b) forcing cars to go around them – probably impatiently and therefore dangerously. Second, the consequences of a car hitting the cyclist carry serious risk of bodily damage to the cyclist. While a cyclist on the sidewalk may hit people, I’d much rather see a pedestrian hit by a cyclist than a cyclist hit by a car. Third, if people can fit into places and dart around to get somewhere faster, they will. Bicycles are much more maneuverable than cars and can go places the cars can’t. We’ve all seen videos of messengers in places like New York weaving between cars in traffic. While cyclists may get where they’re going faster, they also create hazards for both themselves and those around them. Cyclists need to restrict themselves to where they belong. As a side note, this is restricted to city limits due to the fact that outside the city, sidewalks may not be available (see rule #5), and the traffic density is significantly lower. If a sidewalk is available outside city limits, cyclists would still be required to stay on it.
Rule #5: All roads within city limits must have a sidewalk.
Something that frustrates me when trying to get from here to there without a car is when there’s no sidewalk. This leaves you with two options: walking in the street and walking on the shoulder. Walking in the street in the city isn’t too smart, for obvious reasons. Walking on the shoulder isn’t always easy, either. Sometimes roads are cut into banks or have ditches beside them. Sometimes they’re overgrown; sometimes they’re muddy. Basically, the shoulder isn’t always an option. So what is one to do? You’re forced to drive places that are within walking or biking distance (and remember that sidewalks are required for bikes now, too, as per Rule #4). I’m restricting this to city limits because cities are more densely packed than rural areas. While it would be nice to have sidewalks everywhere, the cost/benefit ratio is probably too large. Some special cases may exist. For example if the traffic density is above a certain amount, the sidewalk may be required even outside the city.
So these are my rules relating to roads. That wasn’t so bad, was it? These things are just common sense. Different roads have different names, the same road has only one name, don’t park in the road, don’t mix bicycles and cars, and build sidewalks. By submitting to my rule and following a few simple steps, we can all help make the world a better place … or at least a not-so-bad place to drive.
