The last week has sped by faster than I could ever imagine. So fast that I haven’t had time to post much of anything on here. Everything was whizzing by until about 10:45 last evening. Apparently Fast and the Furious-style street racing is Central Pennsylvania’s new craze in the last couple months. There seems to be an uproar of it in the traffic news lately, but now it has impacted me in an slightly annoying way. Being a former race car driver, the first thing you learn is that racing belongs on the track, not public roadways. Young men and women seem to think that this does not apply to them and that they are immune to the impacts of street racing. This is the fourth incident in the last four months that I have been stuck behind the debacle within visible sight of the nearest exit. Being a relatively new Miata owner, I now realize how pleasing tempting it is to want to race other drivers. I don’t mean occasionally…this is everytime you pop it into first gear at a traffic light or speed past someone at 85 MPH on the freeway with the top down. I was making the weekly return trip from my girlfriend’s place in the Lancaster area. As I approached the Eisenhower interchange from the I-283 side, merging onto I-83 South, I noticed a few sporty vehicles blowing by me at breakneck speeds. As they passed me, I shook my head and muttered “What a bunch of knuckleheads…someone’s going to get hurt!” No sooner did I think that, when I noticed a small red car smash into the center median from the left lane, immediately overturning back into the flow of traffic into an 18-wheeler. There were two 18-wheelers neck-and-neck which tried to avoid making the accident worse, which incidently collided causing an immediate blockage of the two southbound lanes. This occurred just before the 17th Street bottleneck exit on a dangerous stretch of the Capital Beltway. All of the travellers ended up being stuck there until 12:45am and were not happy campers. I was relieved to find out that no one was hurt, but this is definitely an issue that the Capital Region of Central Pennsylvania needs to address. There is simply no good, quick plan for emergency removal of vehicles that does not directly involve a multi-hour inconvenience of halted traffic. I remember an instance when I was in California, the department of transportation used whatever was needed to scoop up the wreckage of a major accident and move it aside to keep the traffic moving – even if it was a snowplow in the dead of summer. All in all, it was a late night, only getting about a solid three hours of shuteye. Maybe tonight will be an improvement, only time will tell….
Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 09/11/07: 27
