Eeediots, I 'm surrounded by Eeediot....Drivers

Atlanta is famous for awful traffic. I haven't run into too many traffic jams but there are usually 4 or 5 accidents each rush hour. Drivers tailgate and weave in and out of the eight lanes of interstate traffic at 80 miles an hour. The unofficial speed limit, observed even by police officers, seems to be 10 to 15 miles above the speed limit at all times. Atlanta has a subway system but it only has two short lines, North-South and East-West. So if you want to drive into Atlanta and the surrounding areas you pretty much have no choice but to drive with these crazies. Yesterday was a particularly idiotic day. It started out with me attempting to leave Peachtree City, where there are really only two main roads which run perpendicular to each other. We live off of 54, from which you take a left onto 74 and you can drive 12 miles to interstate 85 and then on to the city. Brad's apartment is off of a small side road off of 54 and once on 54, two lanes until it crosses 74, we have to cross over a bridge, there is no other way out of our street where our apartment complex is. (I know, I know, brilliant right...let's hope War of the World's doesn't start here, we'd be trapped.) The best part is that Peachtree City, as I've stated before, is a planned community, a studied shining star of what planned communities can be, and it has the worst planned traffic pattern I've ever seen anywhere. It has taken me, depending on the time of day, 30 minutes to drive less than 2 miles because....40,000 people are restricted to two roads.

Now as I was saying, I was leaving the city heading to work. I stopped to get gas and then I drove up to the the light to make a left turn onto 54. There were two cars and a dumptruck ahead of me. All of the traffic problems have not gone unnoticed by the good folks of Peachtree City, they are attempting to widen the road down by our apartment, making 54 four lanes all the way across. So there are dumptrucks and cranes and bulldozers and lots of guys in orange vests. Well the light turned green and the dumptruck goes first. The dumptruck had its bed up at a 45 degree angle, not in the dumping position but back toward the cab. Don't ask me why you'd want the truckbed pointed in that direction but it was. Also don't ask me why it was up. I am not sure if the guy even knew it was up and I watched as the truck drove under the first changelight wire and then turned left under the second, catching the wire on the left pulling all four parts of the square wire intersection down...lights, green street signs and all. It was so surreal. Orange vest guys started running toward the dumptruck waving their arms and yelling. The dumptruck stopped, the guy looked out the back and then he backed up. The two cars in front of me decided to make a run for it and drove under the dangling wire between the dumptruck and the other side of traffic. I drove up and stopped. I wasn't sure if it was safe to drive two feet under electrical wires and by that point a Peachtree City cop had shown up. He pulled his own orange vest out of his trunk and stood in the middle of the intersection basically directing all four ways of traffic to stay put. I waited. A fire pick-up truck comes up. The fireman yells at the cop and the construction workers to get out of the intersection; the wires are hot. Good thing I didn't drive under them. Now all I'm thinking is: I'm trapped. But then I notice that on the other side of the street you can get around the wires. I was trying to make a left turn onto the street but if you were already on the street, heading in the direction I wanted to turn in, and you turned right (that is directly across from me) drove up a ways, made a u-turn and then turned right again, you could get out. I looked right down the street at the long line of traffic but thought, hey at least I can get out, right? Wrong. About 10 cars make their escape and then a dumptruck pulls up in that lane. The dumptruck is too tall to go under the wire even though the wire is higher at that point. So that dumptruck effectively locks in everyone on that side of Peachtree City. The fun part is that behind me was a Wal-Mart, the only Wal-Mart for at least a half an hour so I imagine that some people found themselves trapped in this little Peachtree peninsula. I made a u-turn around a landscape island, at the direction of the cop, and headed home. I called my boss and explained that I was trapped, I would do research from home and if he needed me to come in I could probably get out in a few hours. I didn't end up going to work but I did venture out again and they had put up orange cones on either side of the intersection and through the middle, effectively making 54 a two lane road. At that point they had torn down the wires, lights and green signs. Brad is on the nightshift rotation and he called to say that the lights were back up by 10pm. This morning I noted that they hadn't restored the intersection to four wires hung in a square, rather, they hung one wire on a diagonal and hung the lights across the diagonal in four directions. This is pretty clever I think.

The second disaster, I feel lucky, I wasn't involved in. At about 1:45pm on the 285 bypass, 4 tractor trailers, 2 cars and a utility truck were involved in a chain reaction accident. The last car hit the one in front of it, which hit the one in front of it, and so on. It appeared to be a matter of the first truck stopping and the next six tailgating and unable to stop. One of the trucks was tailgating an SUV which was tailgating the truck in front of it. The SUV was smashed between the two trucks and burst into flames. At one point all of the vehicles were on fire, including a large Fed-Ex truck which was burned until the roof was gone and it was hollowed out. There was one fatality in the SUV and the rest sustained minor injuries. You would think after such a tragic accident that people would be more careful. Nope, today people were tailgating and weaving in and out of traffic at 80 miles an hour this morning. Atlanta drivers have a very slow learning curve.