Road Rants

28-01-2008


First, just to clarify, this rant is in relation to the N4/M50 junction at the Liffey Valley shopping centre in Dublin, Ireland. Just in case somebody leaves a comment about another N4/M50 junction in the world and calls bullshit on what is left here.

I am going to keep this short, because I could probably write a book about how stupid a fuck-up they have made with this. See back in the old days, the junction was more of a round about. A round about with lights on it, so that people got about a third of the way around the round about before they had to stop on the round about. It was madness. Tail backs to beat the band, accidents because idiots tried to run orange lights from half way round the round about, road rage because gobshites parked in the yellowbox and blocked those in the right of way. Who, because they are not going to give a shit about anybody else, in turn blocked the yellowbox as soon as they could.

Then word trickled down, they were going to fix all this bollix. They had off ramps and on ramps and wonderful ramps and no traffic lights and any trace of the round about was going to be only in photos from the days of yore. Of course the population said yea right, they are going to fuck this up big time.

I am new to the driving experience. I am only on the roads a little under a year. As I watched this junction turn from round about to something new I was of open mind. It looked like they were doing it in phases. It looked like the phases actually made sense and worked as temp solutions while other sections of road were built. It all flowed brilliantly and did in fact make the travels through the section of N4 a grand experience. Until about two weeks ago, when they decided to just remove a third lane for no fucking reason and have now created a bottle neck on one of the busiest junctions in Dublin. A bottle neck that stretches back towards the start of the N4, in the City Centre. A bottle neck that they were suppose to be removing by fixing the fucking junction in the first place.

I now, today, understand the term road rage. It is not, as some might tell you, rage directed at fucking nob jockeys in other cars that are likely to cause an accident. It is in fact aimed at the bastards that design roads, because if they actually knew how to design a road properly nobody would drive like a madman to get to places and road rage would not exist.

Found this little website that others might like to look at as well, just throwing it in at the end of this post because it didn't deserve one of its own. It's a good site for learning Python (a language I was sent on an expensive course by work to learn but have yet to actually use).

http://diveintopython.org/toc/index.html

Blue_jester