Friday 27 August 2010

The highway's jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive

And I'm not surprised. Driving, Americans - you would think in a land where the automobile is king they would know how to drive them. Er, no.

I don't think that I have ever seen such inept driving, ever. Even driving in India is better - at least they know how to get on and off at interchanges. Americans seem to have no idea of how to enter a freeway/highway/interstate/turnpike (delete as applicable). I would have thought that idea of, lets call it a motorway, is to keep traffic flowing freely and the idea when getting on is for the traffic already on the road to speed up or slow down (or even change lane) to let the car entering on. That way everyone is able to keep rolling and the traffic keeps flowing.

Not here. Billy Bob in his F150 just keeps on truckin' which means that Jolene has no way of joining the freeway. This is fine in the normal course of things, you just slow down and wait for them to go by and then join. But rush hours? Its metaphorical carnage out there. I have never seen lines of cars queueing on the slip road (I will not call it the on ramp, I will not call it the on ramp....) to get onto a motorway before. And not one or two but dozens of them. I have had the misfortune to be in the car when we have had to join the I95 from Route 3 (our way into central Boston from home) in the rush hour


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This is a bit of road that it should take 2 or 3 minutes to drive down. In the rush hour, it can 15 or 20 minutes. All due to the way people won't let those coming on, on. So lets get out of car and take the train. A fine idea but......

When we were staying in the hotel, we thought "there is a railway station five minutes drive away with a car park, lets get the train into Boston and then get around Boston on the T".  So we did. First problem, the trains only run every two hours. Yes, once every two hours. Admittedly this was a Saturday and they are more plentiful on a weekday rush hour but still. So you miss your train, buggered for two hours.

So after making sure we got there in plenty of time for the train, I go to the ticket office.

"Two returns into Boston and with tickets so we can travel on the subway all day please"

"Certainly Sir, that will be $38 please"

We had already paid $4 for the parking. How do you persuade people to use public transport for those sort of prices when they can drive into Boston on a Saturday and spend 9 bucks for all day parking?

Nice train ride though.

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