Bridging the Bridge Logic Gap

It’s NOT raining. And the bus is going McKinley Bridge instead of the usual route (which we did yesterday and spent a good deal of time snarled in traffic). Slappy is his particularly over-happy self in announcing this to his passengers.

All good things. So the day gets off to a decent enough start. I'm hoping there's a theme there.

I’m still having a hard time understanding the concept of how vital everyone keeps saying it is to have a new Mississippi River bridge and yet it’s perfectly logical to CLOSE one of the lanes we currently do have into the city. (The MLK reopened last week after closing for about 10 days so that one of its two westbound lanes could be permanently closed.)

Both the MLK and the McKinley have seen fatal accidents in the past year or so. This led them to recently put a raised line between the two lanes of traffic on the McKinley Bridge. Why couldn’t they have done the same on the MLK? I mean it’s not the bridges’ fault – it’s the drivers. In people, you generally can’t fix stupid or reckless.

People are going to continue to drive too fast. And sometimes, they’re going to do this while they’re drunk and/or stoned. I’m pretty sure that’s why we have laws against both.

Put a cop out there. Issue a few tickets. That would have been enough to slow at least a few people down. And it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper (and smarter use of tax dollars IMHO) to have done that every day for YEARS than to have shut that bridge down and paid construction costs to close a lane.

But that’s just me. I only ride the bus. What do I know?