Ok, not really a fund raiser...but i have figured out how these guys can make some more money for the city.

Crosswalks.

I go to ACC and walk from my house, which is right across from Littleton High School, all the way there. I think it is between 2 - 3 miles. But everyday that I do walk I really take my life into my own hands. Almost ever intersection some idiot that is either in too much of a hurry so they run the red light, or they are on their cell phone and run the red light, or they really just do not care about the little man blinking white that says I can walk, I almost get hit. Now the intersections are bad. But at the light rail station on Prince and across Church St. there are 2 designated crosswalks.

You can tell them by the BIG GREEN SIGNS and THE WHITE LINES ON THE ROAD. But do you think these ever get watched by the police?

I know that for not having your seatbelt on it's about $50 or more. What is the penalty for almost killing people as they walk across these DESIGNATED areas and cars just fly right past them? I almsot got my hip taken out by a side view mirror on Thursday.

I guess it is going to take someone from ACC or someone getting off the light rail getting smushed for the police to really take the fact that people have no respect for pedestrians anymore.

I know when you come to my blog you expect some funny crap...but after almost getting hit again going to King Soopers i had the need to vent.

Please Mr.Police Officer, take a look into this area and others, cause not only do we have ACC students over there...but there is a blind school as well.

Dave

The best thing about driving is seeing what's going on, or has passed by.  Lately, though, the roadside tells sad stories and driving across town has become a study in heartbreak. 

I've seen more and more empty store fronts and box-store "closing events" advertised by kids with sandwich boards on street corners.  The box stores' closings are sad for the lost jobs and loss of choice.  The saddest, though, are the small-business closings and they always choke me up.  Not only are jobs lost, but someone's hopes and dreams have been reduced to blank space.  There's so much behind a small business' closing.  Many times, the owners lose their home and possessions as well because they'd sunk it all into trying to save a fading dream. 

As the wheels turn and I enjoy the fruits of recession - blowout sales and cheaper gas - it's hard to not feel a little guilty for my own good fortune to date.  It's also hard to not wonder when the blade is going to swing my way, or my family's.   If it does, what will I do?  I'm a survivor, but am I tough enough to take in family if needed?  Wow.  Staying home is looking better all the time.

Yes the winter is almost upon us. I don't really count fall too much because right after Halloween gets here it seems we have to have snow. I correlate snow with winter...so it's winter. But there are some issues I want to address about winter.

1) If you cannot drive in snow either stay in your house, partake in our wonderful public transportaion system, or move your butt to Florida! I swear I see the dumbest people out in their cars getting stuck or having accidents because they have no clue how to drive in the snow.

Funny sidenote on the afformentioned problem. Last winter Shelly and I were going to the store when we saw 2 hispanic guys trying to get their car unstuck on the side of the road. I of course stopped and hopped out to help them push when I noticed the front wheels were spinning pretty harshly but there was nobody in the driver's seat. So before these idiots actually got this vehicle in cruise control unstuck and flying out into traffic I made one of them get in. That was a banner day for stupidity.

2) Send your kids to school in proper attire for winter. Last winter I saw wayyyy too many girls walking up to Littleton High in just a belly shirt.

and finally

3) Make sure that you have plenty of hot chocolate...and for me Shelly...have some Bailey's to go in it!!!

Dave

Does anybody have an opinion on the noise and safety impact Centennial Airport creates for surrounding residential neighborhoods?

http://www.centennialairport.com/

http://www.centennialairportnoise.webs.com/

Hey everybody

My steering wheel in my car is making a squeaky noise when i turn in either direction. At first i thought it was the maybe the steering fluid needed to be drained, but i was also reading some info and it could be a belt that's inside the car?

I dont know jack about cars, and was wondering if somebody can help me out and give out some advice or take it to a trust worthy mechanic.

Thanks so much

Mark

on sept 21 07  my son was involved in a wreck on his motorcycle at about 11:15 am

west bound I 70 at colorado blvd anyone who seen this or knows any first hand info please contact clyderagland@hotmail.com we need help on finding out what really happend that morning thank you  stephen ragland and family

As I travel around, I like to look at the vehicles people are using to tow their travel trailers / 5th wheel trailers, etc.
Most of the time, I cannot believe what some people think is an acceptable towing vehicle for what they are dragging down the road.  I have seen some towing class 4 trailers with Ford Explorers!  What morons!  First of all, what kind of idiot sold this person their trailer (or whatever) without checking if they had a vehicle heavy and strong enough to tow it?  Secondly, what kind of idiot installed the hitch on the Explorer without telling the owner the vehicles towing limitations?  If the person took it upon themselves to tow this behemouth down the road with such a small vehicle, he deserves whatever calamity may come.
Do you not realize that if your trailer outweighs your towing vehicle, that you could literally get shoved off of the road by your trailer?  Do you realize that your vehicle will come to an early demise from all of the overwork?  Or do you care?  Whatever people.
As for me, I'll continue to tow with my 1-ton Cummins.  It gets better mileage than any gasser (16mpg towing, fully loaded) and has way more power than any gasser.  The only thing I slow down for on a mountain pass (any pass) is corners and slower vehicles.
Tow it safe, people.  If you like taking risks, keep doing waht you want.
Some common sense and research will guide you to what you should or should not be towing with what kind of vehicle.

Goco80401 can be credited or thunked for this one, with his pithy remark about some of our lovely on-off ramps around town (he asserts they had to have been designed by primates on hallucinogens).  Naturally, I thought about some of my "favorites" and it is probably a pretty fair guess that nearly everyone has at least one dreadful ramp that brings on that liquid-guts feeling when avoiding it is impossible.

There are a couple of ramps that have terrified me from my very first attempts at them as a young driver almost 30 years ago.  Yes, even then these were fear-inducing whirly-rides that required a steady putt-puttin' around the bend then a hallelujah of a foot-stomping leap of faith in your vehicle to enter the screaming flow of oncoming traffic on the target highway.  Slightly less terrifying now after numerous uses unscathed, if not unscared, is the ramps from south-bound Wadsworth onto either east-bound Sixth Avenue Freeway and the ramp from north-bound Ward Road/44th Avenue onto east-bound I70. 

Anyone who's driven around the west end of the Metro surely recognizes these.  The Wadsworth-Sixth one is part of an old modified cloverleaf interchange with a huge curve that make any speed over 35 a sure bet for an unsuccessful attempt at orbit.  After tootin' around this like old Mr. Magoo in his jalopy, you have about ten feet to reach traffic speed (speed limit 65, real speed at least 75), oh but wait!  There are vehicles trying to merge off right here, too, to get onto Wadsworth.  Their drivers barely dare to decelerate at all as no-one observes the spacing rules.  Yeeha!  Once you manage the weave here, you're faced with mergers-on, as well, while right-lane-riders gunning for the Sheridan exit are threatening to push.  On a good day, you might get lucky enough to have an opportunity to hop left a lane, otherwise it's a careful balancing act of braking, accelerating and hoping.  Once you're successfully on, you've definitely had your daily cardio workout.

Ward Road and I70 is enough to cause night-terrors.  There is no luxury of 10 feet to accelerate, it feels like six feet, and you've come up a bit of a hill on the ramp. The oncoming traffic on east-bound I70 has the advantage of a slight down-grade and amnesia of the fact that thte 75 miles per hour speed limit (85 real speed!) ended miles back.  Not to be overlooked is that the onslaught usually includes at least one semi, as not all of them take the break at the truck stop right there.  More often than not, you've also one sniffing up your tailpipe as you're straining up the ramp trying to achieve something close to a safe merging speed while simultaneously trying to gauge a jumping-in point.  Yiiiiikes!  Thank goodness there isn't the added spice of a forward off-ramp or another on-ramp.  You've got plenty of time to move it, move it, move it before the Kipling exiters scream across the interstate from the left lane.   

Welcome to the wild, wild west, newbies.  It takes grit to drive our highways.  Hope you've got some!

Front page news in the Greeley Tribune...

Looking to Avoid Aggressive Drivers? Check Those Bumpers

Shankar Vedantam Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2008; Page A02

Three horrors await Americans who get behind the wheel of a car for a family road trip this summer: the spiraling price of gas, the usual choruses of "are-we-there-yet?" -- and the road rage of fellow drivers. Divine intervention might be needed for the first two problems, but science has discovered a solution for the third.

 Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.

That's the surprising conclusion of a recent study by Colorado State University social psychologist William Szlemko. Drivers of cars with bumper stickers, window decals, personalized license plates and other "territorial markers" not only get mad when someone cuts in their lane or is slow to respond to a changed traffic light, but they are far more likely than those who do not personalize their cars to use their vehicles to express rage -- by honking, tailgating and other aggressive behavior.

 It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love -- "Visualize World Peace," "My Kid Is an Honor Student" -- or angry and in your face -- "Don't Mess With Texas," "My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student."

 Hey, you clown! This ain't funny! Aggressive driving might be responsible for up to two-thirds of all U.S. traffic accidents that involve injuries.

 Szlemko and his colleagues at Fort Collins found that people who personalize their cars acknowledge that they are aggressive drivers, but usually do not realize that they are reporting much higher levels of aggression than people whose cars do not have visible markers on their vehicles.

Drivers who do not personalize their cars get angry, too, Szlemko and his colleagues concluded in a paper they recently published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, but they don't act out their anger. They fume, mentally call the other driver a jerk, and move on.

"The more markers a car has, the more aggressively the person tends to drive when provoked," Szlemko said. "Just the presence of territory markers predicts the tendency to be an aggressive driver."

The key to the phenomenon apparently lies in the idea of territoriality. Drivers with road rage tend to think of public streets and highways as "my street" and "my lane" -- in other words, they think they "own the road."

 Why would bumper stickers predict which people are likely to view public roadways as private property?

 Social scientists such as Szlemko say that people carry around three kinds of territorial spaces in their heads. One is personal territory -- like a home, or a bedroom. The second kind involves space that is temporarily yours -- an office cubicle or a gym locker. The third kind is public territory: park benches, walking trails -- and roads

 Previous research has shown that these different territorial spaces evoke distinct emotional responses. People are willing to physically defend private territory in ways they would never do with public territory. And people personalize private territory with various kinds of markers -- in their homes, for example, they hang paintings, alter the decor and carry out renovations.

 "Territoriality is hard-wired into our ancestors from tens of thousands of years ago," said Paul Bell, a co-author of the study at Colorado State. "Animals are territorial because it had survival value. If you could keep others away from your hunting groups, you had more game to spear . . . it becomes part of the biology."

 Drivers who individualize their cars using bumper stickers, window decals and personalized license plates, the researchers hypothesized, see their cars in the same way as they see their homes and bedrooms -- as deeply personal space, or primary territory.

 Unlike any environment our evolutionary ancestors might have confronted, driving a car simultaneously places people in both private territory -- their cars -- and public territory -- the road. Drivers who personalize their cars with bumper stickers and other markers of private territory, the researchers argue, forget when they are on the road that they are in public territory because the immediate cues surrounding them tell them that they are in a deeply private space.

"If you are in a vehicle that you identify as a primary territory, you would defend that against other people whom you perceive as being disrespectful of your space," Bell added. "What you ignore is that you are on a public roadway -- you lose sight of the fact you are in a public area and you don't own the road."

Szlemko said that, in an as-yet-unpublished experiment, he conducted tests of road rage in actual traffic. He had one researcher sit in a car in a left-turn lane. When the light turned green, the researcher simply stayed still, blocking the car behind.

Another researcher, meanwhile, examined whether the blocked car had bumper stickers and other markers of territoriality. The experimental question was how long it would take for the driver of the blocked car to honk in frustration.

Szlemko said that drivers of cars with decals, bumper stickers and personalized license plates honked at the offending vehicle nearly two full seconds faster than drivers of cars without any territorial markers.

One of the dumbest damn things I've read so far this week.....

As many of you are aware, scooters are becoming more and more popular.  Many of us have encountered people riding these things in the middle of the road, impeding traffic.  What I want to know is this:  what is being done for laws that govern scooters? 

The operators of these things do not seem to know what they are supposed to be doing, legal or not.  They are not required to have licence plates, and they should be.  They do not require a motorcycle endorsement on your drivers licence to operate, and they should.  I am tired of being cut off, passed on the right via a bike lane, and the general lack of concern these people seem to have for the vehicles around them.  In fact, many scooters are designated for "OFF ROAD USE ONLY", yet they are still being ridden on our streets.

I am of the opinion that they should be classified as motorcycles, since they have 2 wheels and a motor, with a few new rules thrown in.  Such as if your vehicle cannnot go the speed limit, you must travel to the far right and allow other vehicles to pass you.

Something else to keep in mind, scooter buyers:  Many of them have 2-stroke engines.  You may be getting 80 to 100 miles per gallon, but what are you doing to the environment?  Most 2-strokes I have experience with put out more pollution than a poorly maintained 1965 truck.

I don't care that people want to ride scooters, but I do want to see some laws governing these things and then see those laws enforced.