wow, how about the stops, what your is strategy?
I do 65 from MI to FL, I stopped flying and drive to my fishing destinations if I can.
Driving addiction, hard to cure
- Thread starter OM605
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wow, how about the stops, what your is strategy?
I do 65 from MI to FL, I stopped flying and drive to my fishing destinations if I can.
What took the joy away from driving for me was my last job. It wasn't the driving so much, it was the GPS monitoring and the mindless dictate to follow the speed limit. The speed limit on Rt 128 is 55 according to the signs. At 55, you are obstructing traffic. And it is a different type of driving that is just plain wearisome. Driving with the brake pedal, not using the gas to accelerate away from cars to maintain a safe distance. I acquired more nasty grams than anybody else in the dept. I turned 66, retired and a tank in the Fridge lasts over a month now. 
I highly recommend Recorded Books And Wegmans Food Courts for stops
Yeah, I have time to stop for gas. That's about it. I drive 'till it's time to sleep, them get up in the morning and get going again. Then work repairing broken aircraft as needed. Which lately has been pretty easy.
Oh yeah, my audiobook library is truly epic. I love technical books, biographies and science fiction. So there is a never ending selection. Even that gets old too. But a good story is a good story.
Absolutely. But it is surprising how quick and nice handling the E350 with the sport package can be considering it is a big, heavy sedan. I'm not saying it performs like a sports car. It doesn't. Nothing like the SL550 I used to drive. But it does quite well . . . enough to be a real pleasure to drive.
My commute to work is slightly over 2 miles, so about the same. But I save my long drives for the weekends and days off.
Unfortunately, my life is dedicated to making my swampy ----hole a functional house. I used to love driving everywhere for fun!
What took the joy away from driving for me was my last job. It wasn't the driving so much, it was the GPS monitoring and the mindless dictate to follow the speed limit. The speed limit on Rt 128 is 55 according to the signs. At 55, you are obstructing traffic. And it is a different type of driving that is just plain wearisome. Driving with the brake pedal, not using the gas to accelerate away from cars to maintain a safe distance. I acquired more nasty grams than anybody else in the dept. I turned 66, retired and a tank in the Fridge lasts over a month now.
I worked for a company and after about 8 years there they put the GPS junk in the delivery trucks. I was a technically a delivery guy but I knew how to run the location and do EVERYBODYS job, including both my bosses. I ignored the GPS. After 10 write ups in 3 months I told them to fire me or leave me alone and let me do my job. I never heard another word about it.
Almost two years later and the addiction is far from gone. I was able to contain it and drive less for a while but i recently bough another W124 and drove it 7000 km in 2 months. Fuel prices are extreme but i still have a hard time trying to drive less...
The grid layout is called the Hippodamian Plan and goes back to Hippodamus, a 5th century BCE Greek architect, who is considered the granddaddy of European urban planning. Besides making for a somewhat samey-samey look, it does allow for easy orientation by direction and by counting blocks. "Go 10 blocks east, hang a right, and after 3 blocks turn left and drive until you see the tastefully done 25-foot statue of a pink cucumber holding a shovel."
I've always loved driving. I have yet to slow down.
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Like many of you, I love to drive.
Power heads want E and G forces...test their vehicles cohesion with the road....enjoy the roar.
I want to hear all 4 tires evenly kissing the pavement as they roll, seriously. I dig it when it's 'smooth'.
I know I don't want to pay dearly for max hp or soft tires.
I didn't pound the car when we had Saabs....I drove 'em.
Power heads want E and G forces...test their vehicles cohesion with the road....enjoy the roar.
I want to hear all 4 tires evenly kissing the pavement as they roll, seriously. I dig it when it's 'smooth'.
I know I don't want to pay dearly for max hp or soft tires.
I didn't pound the car when we had Saabs....I drove 'em.
Here's how to fix that:
Move to Northern Virginia.
Between the horrible traffic and awful drivers, you'll soon hate going anywhere. The potholes and missing/faded street signs with trees growing in front of them, as well as the mis-timed traffic signals will also contribute to your hatred of driving.
Get stuck in a traffic jam will fix that real quick. Like 3 hrs a day traffic.
Not all of North America uses a grid pattern. At least as far as the USA is concerned, only pubic lands states which were surveyed with Public Land Survey System do. These were surveyed and laid out in 40-acre parcels. Which is where the terms "back 40" and "front 40" and "40 acres and a mule" came from.
The largest block size you'll commonly see in most of these states is 160 acres or 1/4 mile by 1/4 mile. You can go out to any rural area in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois (to name a few) and there will be crossroads every 1/4 mile. In the urban and suburban areas with this sort of grid pattern, there will typically be a major road every 1 mile.
The advantage to this system is that there are many parallel routes and so if a road is closed due to a flood, an accident, or whatever, a detour might take you a mile or two out of your way at most. And, as an area transitions from rural to suburban or urban, the blocks become smaller. A 300-home subdivision in one of the 160-acre blocks will be surrounded by four existing roads and could (and probably will) have access points on all of them.
Now let's compare that to what we have on the east coast of the USA, specifically, Virginia.
Virginia has no grid pattern, except in big cities. There are many places in Virginia where a road closure will make you take a 10 or even 20 mile detour. Many of the oldest roads in Virginia seemed to have been laid out for the sole purpose of transporting cotton and tobacco to port, and there is a dearth of roads going in some directions and linking some populated areas. A common comment about the roads in Northern Virginia is that "whomever designed these roads must have been on LSD".
I can assure you that they were designed long before LSD was invented...and were probably barely adequate when the area was tobacco and cotton fields..
The 300-home subdivision in Northern Virginia will likely have one single access point, and that may well be on a 2-lane highway. Another 300-home subdivision may be built off of that same 2-lane highway right next to the existing one and the only connection between the two will be the existing highway.
Because there's no existing grid pattern to enforce some sort of order on how development is done, developers will do whatever is cheapest for them, even if it creates a traffic problem. A common complaint from the person living in the 300-home subdivision is that they want a traffic signal because there's so much traffic on the 2-lane road, the only one their neighborhood is connected to, that they have problems making left turns.
And new roads are typically dead-end streets that serve only the neighborhood they connect to. Take a look at a map from say 1850, and you'll notice that most of the roads in Northern Virginia that actually connect to other roads and therefore could serve as a thru-route...existed in 1850. There have been some new roads that have been built to serve as thru-routes but not nearly as many as the population increase since then would warrant. And some of them are Interstates, so now you have local traffic using the Interstate as a thru-route which it really wasn't intended for, and which causes congestion on the Interstate.
The problem is that you have to be somewhere but instead you're in your car. That reduces the enjoyment
Car Cruising Makes a Comeback During Pandemic
The popular car trend from the 1950s is seeing a resurgence amid coronavirus. Take a look back how Americans took short drives in their vehicles.
www.aarp.org
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