I Hate Seattle

I was standing in line to use an ATM at the BofA on Stones Way drive near 35th in Fremont a couple of weeks ago when a bicycle messenger drove up. Before he had a chance to get off his bike, another bicyclist came up behind him and asked if he could speak to him about something.

He said that he had just witnessed him blowing through a red light AND a stop sign moments before and said it pissed him off to see cyclist ignoring traffic laws. He said that was the reason so many drivers had bad feelings towards bicyclists.

I stood there literally with my mouth hanging open and would have shaken the second bicyclist's hand if he'd waited around long enough but after he received a mumbled "sorry" from the first cyclist, he drove off.

Needless to say, when the first bicyclist left, he proceeded to run the stop sign at the corner.......guess he had a short attention span.

Traffic circles – a fine idea – in Europe! In Seattle, not so much. For some reason, Seattle-ites seem to have trouble deciding how to enter them. But then again, maybe I’m the one who is clueless and there are secret rules of which I’m unaware. Perhaps it is something simple like “On even numbered Mondays, enter traffic circles to the right on streets beginning with the letter ‘S’ and on odd number Thursdays, enter traffic circles to the left on all streets….unless the Mariners are playing a home game…” Whatever the rules are, I’ve almost been smacked head-on by cars cutting left at a circle while I was trying to enter from the right. And most of them are TOO DARN BIG for the intersections in which they are placed anyway. It’s inconvenient enough that cars park on both sides of already narrow streets but even when you manage to thread your way to an intersection, the bloody circles are big enough to house a drive-through Starbucks.

I’m curious. Does Seattle have something against stop signs? I see them at some intersections but not others. What is the reasoning behind that? Did we exhaust our Federal subsidy for red octagonal signs or was the money siphoned off to help try and keep the Sonics in Seattle or fund the Monorail Project?

Oh, wait…….