Back from St. Louis

It's a long drive from the Twin Cities to St. Louis, with a significant chunk of it in Iowa. With stops for gas and a meal, it's typically about a 10-hour trip. I spent most of my usual blogging time this morning trying catch up with the news I'd missed over the weekend, but I'm not convinced anything significant is actually happening.

I do like St. Louis generally and Saint Louis University in particular. It's a pretty campus in the heart of the city and it feels like a refuge from the urban squalor that is often associated with the area. We ate at good restaurants and enjoyed some excellent company. It's been, and will continue to be, a great place for Fearless Maria to attend college.

If you think something else merits discussion, please feel free to have at it in the comments section. I will be back to more regular blogging tomorrow.

Late to the party, but. . .

We have been traveling the last few days, primarily in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. A fair amount of news has come through since then, so a catch-up is in order.

• I'll probably watch the dashcam video of the Philando Castile/Jeronimo Yanez encounter, which went quite badly, at some point, although I try to avoid snuff films. From what I can gather, it's clear Yanez panicked and shot Castile. Is that murder? Probably not, which is why John Choi and his prosecutors went for manslaughter. Even so, it's a heavy lift for a conviction, especially when Yanez was able to have Earl Grey, one of the best lawyers in the Twin Cities, represent him. It's an injustice that Castile died that day, but there are no easy solutions to the issues surrounding this case. And man, are there issues. More to come on all that.
• Just about everywhere I traveled in the last few days, if there was a television on in the background it was tuned to CNN. In many cases, the sound on the television was turned down. Good thing, too. If you watch the screen and don't hear the sound, you can concentrate on the facial expressions and body language. What's evident is barely concealed rage. The parade of talking heads with unremitting scowls suggested that everyone involved would rather be doing something else. The obsession with Le Grand Orange is turning everyone on that network into Captain Ahab with somewhat better tailoring.
• In case you hadn't heard, the Republican (Karen Handel) won in the special election in Georgia. Another harpoon misses the Great Orange Whale, who swims along in the tears of his would-be tormentors. I probably shouldn't enjoy it, but to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, one must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Jon Ossoff's campaign without laughing.
• Pro tip -- if you want to visit Philadelphia and you only have an afternoon for sight-seeing, don't go on the day of the Pride Parade. Some of the worst traffic I've ever encountered.
• Pro tip two -- if you need to get across Washington, D.C., during evening rush hour, pick a day when severe thunderstorms aren't coming through. Also some of the worst traffic I've ever encountered.

More on the college visit aspect of our trip in a future post.

Mellow Yellow

I see 'em a lot more than I used to -- the flashing yellow left-turn signal at an intersection. And apparently the signals are confusing people:

By the looks of things, drivers in Plymouth — and probably other places, too — could use a crash course on how to navigate intersections governed by flashing yellow turn arrows.

This comes after an analysis by Plymouth police found that nearly 50 percent of crashes at the intersection of Rockford Road and Fernbrook Lane were the result of drivers not yielding to oncoming traffic when flashing yellow arrows were operating.

Between March 10, 2016 and Feb. 22, officer Scott Kirchner said there were 34 crashes at the busy intersection, and 16 were attributed to motorists failing to yield. The intersection handles 21,000 vehicles a day, according to a 2013 traffic count by the Hennepin County Transportation Department. Of those drivers, 4,093 make left turns. Keep in mind those counts were taken four years ago so the numbers are probably higher.

I don't go through that area much, if ever -- it's probably been a good ten years since I have, but it's easy to understand why there's a problem. It's often difficult to gauge the speed of oncoming traffic in the suburbs, because the posted speed limits often don't have much to do with reality. You don't necessarily know whether the oncoming traffic is coming at you at 35 MPH or 45 MPH. In my area, County Road D/37th Avenue NE tends to have a lot of traffic, but it's often coming more slowly than you think (sometimes less than 30 MPH), while the speeds on Old Highway 8 tend to be faster (often closer to 50 MPH). It's especially tough to make a left turn from Foss Road onto Old Highway 8, which gets a lot of overflow traffic from 35W. That intersection, a T-style intersection, does not have any traffic control other than a stop sign and you can end up waiting as long as 4-5 minutes to make that turn during rush hour. You also have several apartment buildings on Old Highway 8 with people impatiently trying to get out of their parking lots, so making that left-hand turn has been a white knuckle affair for the 20 years I've lived in the area.

The idea of a flashing yellow is to stop the backups at intersections, but it doesn't necessarily work. The linked Star Tribune article suggests one reason:

Impatience might be a factor, too. [Plymouth police officer Scott Kirchner] said drivers waiting to turn at the intersection have had motorists behind them honk.

“They hear that horn and think it’s my turn and go without thinking,” Kirchner said. “There is the pressure and they think maybe I can make this gap.”

We have more need for traffic control than ever before. We don't spend as much money on roads as we could, because we spend a lot of transportation money on other things. I don't have time to rehearse those arguments this morning, but we need to think more about how we move people and goods through our communities.

Home at last

We got home from Ohio last night. We'll get back to the usual fare in a day or so, but I wanted to say something about the interstate highway system. It's easy and generally appropriate to bash the federal government for its overreach and malfeasance, but one thing is clear -- the interstate highway system is a marvelous creation. Our route to Ohio included:

35W
94
90/94
39/90/94
39/90
39
55
74
74/465
465
70
75

While in Ohio we used 675 as we were bopping around Dayton

Our return trip included:

75
70
465
865
65
80/94
80
294
90
39/90
39/90/94
94
35W

We also used US Highway 35, US Highway 6, US Highway 30 and a few other state roads. It's really an amazing thing that we take for granted. We shared these roads with untold thousands of people and, except for the annoying toll roads in Illinois, our only expense was the gasoline and wear/tear on our vehicle. Yes, we all pay taxes for the roads, but it's a great value.