Dagrim's Tales

The road closure at the corner was supposed to last three weeks. It has been four months and the street is more torn up and blocked than ever. There are two barricades with big signs saying ROAD CLOSED TO THROUGH TRAFFIC. However the sidewalk is still open and the bicycle/pedestrian traffic through there is heavy. I think there are a lot of people like us who enjoy watching the construction, and others who hope to walk/pedal a route with fewer cars, so they choose to come this way.

The other thing we are seeing regularly, are huge tractor trailer rigs that come down here, passing both the ROAD CLOSED signs, only to get stuck. It’s quite a show watching them struggle to back up, around a curve and a 90 degree corner, past parked cars, on a narrow tree lined street. There was one rig that was probably the maximum legal size that can travel without an oversized load banner, that got stuck in here for four hours. Poor bastard had two giant trailers. Eventually some other guys arrived to help him drop one trailer and guide him as he backed the other out, then come back to pick up and back the second trailer. And while this was going on, the library was hosting an event with free ice cream, so he was backing up while hundreds of kids were swarming around. Yeesh!

So I have been wondering… Y’know those mapping apps, like Waze or Apple Maps or whatever, how they track phones moving around to find routes? I wonder if they are tracking phones carried by pedestrians and bicyclists, traveling that sidewalk by the hundreds? And sending other users down here because, based on the mobile phones that go by, the road looks like it is open?

Maybe this is why those big rigs keep driving past the signs.

I bet the other streets coming into Main from this side, which are open to cars, have no more phones than we do, moving no faster. It is slow crossing this neighborhood, in that direction, even in a car.