Montrose Road SUCKS STINKS! SUCKS!!

The new traffic "plan" that outlines what would otherwise be a barely significant portion of my daily commute has provided me an opportunity to discuss not only the vagueness of the word "plan" but also how I'm making a sincere effort to remove the word "sucks" from my vocabulary. It's one of those words that my mom never liked (unlike "schmata" and "schmuck" and other I guess a fine assortment of other "schm" words) and when I would utter it she would raise her eyebrow of disdain and glare, "Sucks sucks! I hate that word!". Now, all of a sudden I, too, find "sucks" somewhat grating and just, well, unnecessary. While not known for admitting when my mother is correct un-wrong, certainly stinks is a more ladylike term than sucks. Professional, even. Seeing an ex walk into your building doesn't suck, it stinks. It doesn't suck that my clients didn't take any time off in December, it stinks. There, that's wasn't so bad, now was it? Might even technically be more accurate, depending on the ex. Figure if I can eradicate the F word from my personal database (no, silly, not that F word, bite your tongue!) that I should be able to blow suck out of it, too.

Represented on the map, below, is the stretch of road that I drive each morning and evening on my way to and fro. Prior to last week, I even sometimes utilized it to acquire luxuries such as lunch. The road stretches through a modest, home-lined rural area, not unlike millions of others (except that each afternoon some kind of questionable police action takes place and the six-lane road is shut down for 10 minutes by cops standing in the middle with their arms up like daredevil hall monitors as the local B'nai empties it's parking lot. WTF?! Who sanctions this?? Can't a member of the tribe get home before shabbos?! Oy). Okay so, I used to drive it. Now my car and I sit on it. We sit and we watch longingly as NewsChopper7 flies in circles overhead. We sit and ponder how this plan, some 20 years in the making, went so horribly, horribly wrong (this must be what Mr. and Mrs. Spears feel like). Traffic lights misfiring, roads converging, turn lanes amok; complete and utter chaos. Is that laughter I hear coming from the direction of Chopper7??

While I'm sure the new $70,000,000 bikeway (that's SEVENTY MILLION DOLLAR), indicated by urine-in-snow-like yellow dashes below, is beautiful and peaceful and that the lyme-plague bringing local deer appreciate the efforts, my commute has gone from 20 minutes to 60 and the traffic on this .7 mile road has gone from somewhat aspberger-esque to completely fucking retarded.

The breakdown:
the roadways indicated by blue, purple, indigo, and green, are now completely fubarred. There is no scheduled relief in sight; the road is just closed, and that's that.
Yeah, that's so what this area needed.

Why, oh why, have you forsaken me, Department of Transportation? Is this about the traffic tickets? The parking tickets? The article in the school paper about the parking tickets and the traffic tickets and how you are the most incompetent of all incompetent government agencies? Did the circus peanut have something to do with this??!

Ok, I gotta go, it's after 5pm and if I don't hit the road now I'll never make it home in time for breakfast.