I don’t know about you but I find it rather irritating when a car or SUV pulls up next to me at a stop light and my rear view mirror falls off because of the vibration caused by their sound system. I feel the same way about some of the exhaust systems that guys are putting on their cars. Does a four-cylinder Honda Civic go any faster if it’s louder? Where’s a police officer when you need one? Thanks to a test being conducted in Australia, you may not need one. Officials there have connected microphones to some of their cameras. When a vehicle passes by that exceeds a given noise level, the camera snaps a still picture and takes a 10-second video (with sound). The vehicle’s owner is then issued a ticket in the mail just like they would be if they’d run a red light and exceeded the speed limit. I’m not a big fan of camera-based law enforcement by any stretch of the imagination but it would still be kind of neat if some of these sound polluters had to pony up at some point.
Rally worth talking about
It was good to see that the oft-postponed rally by the Northern Virginia Transportation Commission finally was held earlier this week. These sorts of events really end up being “preaching to the choir” but this one was a chance for the parties involved to show regional unity in the effort to get a regional funding mechanism for Metro. I was interested in the comments by one of the two Prince William delegates opposed to the funding plan that many of his constituents either drive or use slug lines and they therefore don’t need to help fund Metro. Slugs are something borne of frustration and ingenuity by residents. Slug lines are areas where people going to certain employment centers gather to catch rides into work and allow the drivers picking them up to qualify for the HOV lanes. Slug lines get no governmental support and should be seen as a symptom of a problem with congestion rather than as an in-place solution that negates the need for Metro.
More dirt on Metro
Rosalie writes to say that the problem with eating and trash and dirt on the trains is not just a problem on Metro: “I totally agree with the article posted in Tuesday’s Examiner. Metro and other trains are getting more dirty and filthy. People are just plain nasty and that is probably the way their homes and cars are. Even on the VRE trains, it has been posted over and over again about taking your trash with you and not putting your feet on the seats. Yet people continue to do it, even with signs posted and conductors walking up and down the aisles. Some of the seats are really dirty and I hate to sit down in some of them. A lot of the dirt on the seats comes from people eating and dropping food on the seat and not cleaning up after themselves or from construction workers who wear the same clothes all week long and leave their dirt behind.”
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