h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In my part of Texas we have very short on and off ramps for the freeways. We also have a state law that says that the car exiting the freeway has the right of way. This leads to many accidents and near-accidents because:

1) Those who know the law use it to cover cutting over 3 lanes of traffic some blocks after they exited the freeway - hey, they STILL have the right of way, cause they came off the freeway.

2) Drivers from states with silly laws giving the right of way to the people on the access road have NO idea they should be yielding to people coming off the freeway, so they don't.

So watch out in Texas! Long ago a teacher I had told us that Texans love two things - their guns and their cars - and they use them BOTH as weapons.

In Hawaii they also have incredibly short on- and off-ramps. I never actually studied their laws there, but I got a general feeling that cars on the on-ramp had a distinct lack of right-of-way. Either that, or it was a statewide character flaw that caused this: cars would go WAY too slow on the on-ramp to merge with traffic. They'd still be going 40mph (max) at the end of the lane, and traffic would come bearing down on them at 55+. When I would get stuck behind one of these drivers on the on-ramp, I would grit my teeth and wait for the accident that, thankfully, never came.

Right you are, C! I still have nightmares about driving through Dallas...

Tell me about it, Amanda - I'm living that nightmare!

Which brings me to another one - who else has this going on? It's with red lights on traffic signals.

Here when the light goes red, the "joke" goes that it means only 6 more cars can go thru the intersection. Since the people were running red lights, the powers-that-be in charge of red lights decided to make the delay longer between when one light goes red and the next goes green - to give a little safety time during which it is supposedly not deadly to run red lights. I think I read that they nudged it up to about 30 seconds at some intersections. And what they actually did was encourage these idiots to run red lights, since they noticed that no line of traffic had the green.

Now it is impossible to reduce the delay time -- the perps running the red lights wouldn't know about it and they'd kill more people. And the same drivers -- having the intelligence of a sack of sand -- are out there at other red lights thinking the delay time THERE is also 30 seconds, and running on through.

Needless to say why I was reading about this was that the incidence of death due to running red lights is going up and the newspaper was speculating that this idiotic handling was contributing to the toll. And it's non-reversible! Aaargh!

They need to put in those cameras that snap pictures of everyone running the red lights, look up their plates and send them tickets.

Yeah. Stop lights in St. Louis equal "I'm moving along great! Why stop now?". Seriously, you can almost hear people saying it. Whereas stop *signs* pretty much translate into "Tap the brake and slow down a little".