Traffic
It's Monday, March 7. We spent a few hours at Mom's yesterday and the drive back hammered home one thing I most definitely will NOT miss when we move to Scotland: Traffic. The drive down wasn't bad. We left the house at 6:40 a.m. Traffic was light. However, the trip home was a very different story. We left around 2 p.m. and by then, all the idiots were up and clogging the left lanes. Even though there are signs everywhere saying "Slower Traffic Keep Right," most drivers seem to think that doesn't apply to them. So the 100+ miles home was filled with lane jumping, slow downs, speed ups, and general frustration.
On today's Florida highways, if you have any hope of making any kind of progress, you have to be prepared to pass on the right. All too often, the middle and left lanes are crammed full of slow-moving people and the right lane is completely empty. In the UK, the sides are reversed (the slow lane is the left lane - you know - the whole drive on the opposite side thing), and there, it is verboten to pass on the left. Steve mentioned that to me at one point during the drive and I said that the joy of it is, in the UK, most people actually drive in the correct lane. The only time I had ever witnessed rampant misuse of the fast lanes was in the drive from Oxford to London. Everywhere else, people drive in the left lane and when they come upon someone moving slower, they move to the middle lane, then they go back into the left lane. It's glorious.
So I will most definitely not miss highway traffic, nor the need to pass on the wrong side.
But highway traffic isn't the only traffic I won't miss. I'm not going to miss the congested traffic that comes part and parcel with urban living. We live 17 miles from my work, but it takes 30 minutes in the morning, and usually about 40-45 minutes in the afternoon to get home. All because of congested roadways. Jacksonville is the largest city in area within the contiguous forty-eight states, and it has a population in excess of 821,000 people. That's a lot of people who have a lot of distance to cover every morning and afternoon. By contrast, Inverness is a relative small city and it's population is only about 65,000. Steve's future boss told him that a lot of people live in smaller villages thirty and forty miles away because they don't have congestion problems on the road. You can live forty miles away and still have our current 30-minute morning commute. I like that idea very much.
On today's Florida highways, if you have any hope of making any kind of progress, you have to be prepared to pass on the right. All too often, the middle and left lanes are crammed full of slow-moving people and the right lane is completely empty. In the UK, the sides are reversed (the slow lane is the left lane - you know - the whole drive on the opposite side thing), and there, it is verboten to pass on the left. Steve mentioned that to me at one point during the drive and I said that the joy of it is, in the UK, most people actually drive in the correct lane. The only time I had ever witnessed rampant misuse of the fast lanes was in the drive from Oxford to London. Everywhere else, people drive in the left lane and when they come upon someone moving slower, they move to the middle lane, then they go back into the left lane. It's glorious.
So I will most definitely not miss highway traffic, nor the need to pass on the wrong side.
But highway traffic isn't the only traffic I won't miss. I'm not going to miss the congested traffic that comes part and parcel with urban living. We live 17 miles from my work, but it takes 30 minutes in the morning, and usually about 40-45 minutes in the afternoon to get home. All because of congested roadways. Jacksonville is the largest city in area within the contiguous forty-eight states, and it has a population in excess of 821,000 people. That's a lot of people who have a lot of distance to cover every morning and afternoon. By contrast, Inverness is a relative small city and it's population is only about 65,000. Steve's future boss told him that a lot of people live in smaller villages thirty and forty miles away because they don't have congestion problems on the road. You can live forty miles away and still have our current 30-minute morning commute. I like that idea very much.
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