Well that explained itself in short order.

I was thinking, hey, I’d never seen one of these before…

image

It’s a shopping cart to allow the companion to a person with special needs to secure them in the cart while they go shopping.

But who would need this?

image

This guy. This guy needs to be tightly strapped into that cart and left there so he can do no further harm by operating motor vehicles tonight.

image
It does not work that way. None of this works that way. Nope.

¡Miami esta la pinga!

There I know enough Spanish to swear in it

Coming home from work, I’m sitting at a long red light wondering how to drink the last bit of coconut water from an irresponsibly tall carton of it because the thing his the ceiling before it tilts enough. I’m sitting there stopped for about ten seconds when… Bang.

The car stalls instantly. No airbags fired but the fucking coconut water is now airborne before landing on my nice red leather trenchcoat. Fuck a duck.

I get out kinda in disbelief, stunned and shaken but unhurt. The first thing I see is the car behind me with the front end totally munched!

The driver gets out and she’s really apologetic and rubbing her forehead. I look at the back of my car and, well…

image
What even are these things made of

Look at all that damage! Uh, look hard…. It’s just not there.

We exchange information and the driver goes on and on about how she’d rather pay out of pocket for my repairs because she is on SR-22 insurance. The classic strategy for trying to escape liability in the ghetto….

But there’s no damage to my car and I’m not even mad.

Then she points out she wasn’t wearing her seat belt and her head hit the glass.

No.

I’m mad now damn it.

F=ma, bitch.

I’m an engineer. Trust me. Buckle up.

She’s going on about how her car is brand new (to her) and she just wrecked it…. I didn’t know what sr-22 meant at the time but it apparently means she’s crashed at fault three times in a year??

Now, why did her car pretty much take it up the nose from my rear bumper? It wasn’t the car’s first crash either. Looking in the grille, the metal part of the bumper was crushed back into the AC condenser…. and rusted like that. Someone had just slapped new plastic parts and paint on the car, leaving it with no actual bumper, so it neatly crushed the hood on impact.

Well. Maybe now you’ll stop texting and driving and for fuck’s sake buckle up. You wouldn’t mail fragile items without padding…. Don’t stick yourself in a big metal box unprotected.

My car wouldn’t crank for a couple minutes after the crash but then just reset?! Not sure what to make of that, but I guess it needed time to convince itself it was safe to restart.

Oh Miami, you fabulous jizz whistle.

Kendall votes to push the big red button

So that’s it, Kendall has declared itself broken and wants no new development until its traffic problems are fixed… via mass transit improvements.

Sorry guys, you’re trafFUCKED. Forever. Why? You moved into bullshit like this. Here’s an example of the road structure common in KendHELL:

image

Developments were intentionally fragmented and designed to make access via anything but motor vehicle impractical to impart an aesthetic sense of distance from the major roadways and create an artificial sense of isolation and security. Many developments are walled in completely and gated.

Yeah… Good luck with that mass transit… It’s nearly impossible. Enjoy your four hour traffic jams.

Might as well just flood it again and return it to the Everglades 😉

Okay, who just broke Miami?

Over the past year or so I’ve constantly heard people saying that the transportation problems in Miami are the worst they’ve ever seen… Day after day, as it keeps progressively getting worse.

Well, I’ve never seen it this bad either.

The Venetian Causeway is gone. The MacArthur and Julia Tuttle causeways have nightly reductions to one lane. I-95 is probably closed more than it’s open now. The Palmetto Expressway has dangerous lane shifts causing constant accidents as it is hacked and slashed to bits to turn it into a corridor of Lexus lanes and fail.

The alternative is kind of failing royally though. Today, I was treated to the sight of Tri-Rail sailing away seven minutes early yet again after being delayed for about ten by a Hollywood public works crew closing an entire four lane road to painstakingly remove small pieces of litter from the wide median.

At that point I checked Waze, it’d be 1 hour 25 minutes to drive to work or about 1 hour to catch Metrorail directly. Upon arrival there, I found the system stalled due to a broken down train.

image
Not shown here: the cherry red glowing dynamic brake grid on the fourth car that I just couldn't get a photo of.

Metromover breaks down on a daily basis, if not more, and the buses are of course at the mercy of the plugged roads.

I think this sprawling mess has just about had it… and that’s even before any dumbass developments like Krome Gold, Lennar Parkland, American Dream, Green City, Ludlam Trail, or anything like that goes live.

Actually, speaking of Green City….

"Green City", which I colored in Slightly Rotten Tomato Red
“Green City”, which I colored in Slightly Rotten Tomato Red

Green City is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of. The plan is to use this big plot of land currently occupied by seasonal farms and a weird old deep well injection / aquifer storage and recovery (ASR, also known as Complete and Utter Bullshit) site. The development proposals call for this to be a transit oriented development.

Only problem is……. there’s no transit.

The nearest transit is a couple of bus routes that run every 30 minutes during daylight hours and then cut off. WEEKDAY ONLY. The very southernmost part of it is somewhat near-ish to a park and ride and transit hub south of Kendall Drive, but not within walking distance as that thing’s set WAAAY back in the middle of nowhere.

I recall a few years back reading about how there were certain guidelines for transit oriented development; you were not qualified for certain funding and other benefits unless the transit line was already in place and offered 24 hour service with a reasonable service frequency. I can’t find those rules again today. Are those still in place? Or, is the developer simply not actually counting on this thing actually being qualified as transit oriented development and just slapping that buzzword on it in hopes of getting a foot in the door towards pushing the Urban Development Boundary more easily?

I don’t know. All I know is, well, fuck this and the Cadillac Escalade it rolled in on.

The aftermath…

image
The before pic, disregard the creative fix for a broken mounting clip

3 hours, 29 minutes
3.85 gallons of gas
26.1 miles

Yeah that’s a commute to be proud of, isn’t it?

At least now I’m home and not questioning the futility of existence anymore. Life is much better when not being trafFUCKED.

Midway there

image

I left too late this morning to take a train to work and now I’m once again taking the awful evening drive out of Miami.

I’m writing this while waiting in a line where maybe one car gets out every 5 minutes. So far I’ve burned 2.7 gallons of gas.

I forgot just what a soul sucking pit of traffic and crowded desolation this drive really is.

…Crawling through cities and towns with no community.

Fences, guard houses, walls, and special taxing districts to seal out the outside world they destroyed by isolating from it.

If the traffic had been clear when I left work and I just kept driving, I could have been in Fort Myers or Melbourne by now.

Where are the outlets for creativity? Where is the enjoyment? What’s left here? The brain drain can’t be this complete, can it?

Why did you really buy into thinking this would bring enjoyment?

What’s the point in even living and working here? All I’m seeing is an overpriced warehouse for people with a few Brazilian owned stalls selling Chinese made trinkets and frozen factory farmed junk food.

I guess there’s a beach but it’s all walled off too.

The common expression is to be tired of a town — but what do you call it when it’s a string of identical towns with no community or creativity?

image
No life on this frequency.

Where’s the warmth, the excitement, the energy, and the experience of man rejoining with nature?

How the fuck many locations does Wings gift shop even have?!

This just all makes me feel a bit hopeless, like I’m seeing nothing to gain and living a useless life that’s half wasted already. Nobody cares unless we ruin something that was important to someone else. We ourselves could just rot away unnoticed.

Rest assured most of this hopeless feeling depression clears upon arriving home for the evening. Or at this rate, tomorrow’s wee hours of morning.

image
And there you have it, what a few hours in traffic does to the mind. Push the red button. Thanks.

We need our BayLink.

image

I’m not standing in front of the yellow line aboard this bus just to live dangerously. I’m standing in front of it because the bus is at a crush load and there is no space left behind the line.

Almost every bus from downtown Miami to Miami Beach runs packed like this.

So who keeps deciding we don’t need a high capacity train service connecting to Miami Beach?

You eeeeediots!!