Commute

From: Mapquest

As another round of dire winter weather warnings headlined the day, I was pondering the current state of roadway maintenance in the area.
First, you've heard me talk, several times, about the forty mile (each way) daily commute, from my home in rural central Jefferson County to suburban central St. Louis county.
I do not consider myself a hapless victim of this situation, I chose to live where I live, knowing full well that the only reasonable employment opportunities would be as much as an hour away. It was a compromise. I really wanted to settle on a beach in Saint Martin in the Caribbean, but the commute would have been much, much longer and they talk funny there. So Hillsboro, Mo, it was, the obvious second choice.
So I'm not whining. I knew seven years ago that this would be a daily slog, simply part of the job.
The commute has two major components, twenty miles on Highway 21 in Jefferson County, sixteen on I-270. The rest is taken up by a couple of rural roads near my house and the industrial roads off of the Page Ave exit where my cubicle resides.
In good weather 21 is a breeze. Four lanes, interstate style exits, hardly ever jammed at any point, 65mph almost all the way. I can usually make it from my house to the 270 on-ramp in a half hour, occasionally less. There's a few stoplights once it gets into StLCo, but they are pretty well timed. No lights at all between my house and the county line.
I-270 is more iffy. There are good days and bad days, and some very, very bad days. At night, or the middle of the day, or a weekend, I can make the entire trip from work to home, in about 45-50 minutes. Of course, during the week, at the rush hours, that simply never happens. I leave work at 5 P.M., and usually, usually get home between 6:15 and 6:30.  It all depends on 270 though. I- 270 is the bypass, the best route there is, the alternatives are virtually non-existent. I've tried, Lord knows I've tried, to find a 'bad-day' route, but they all quickly clog up themselves as other people try exactly the same thing.
A local radio station reports on traffic conditions 'on the 10's' every day during drive time. By 5:10 I'm usually within a half mile of 270, so I do have an opportunity to divert, as if there were actually any better route.
No, I mostly just suck it up, mentally prepare myself when I hear 'brake lights are on all the way from Olive to Dougherty Ferry', which occurs a couple or more times per week. The road between those two exits makes up 75% of my 270-trek.

Heaven forbid there be a raindrop or snowflake spotted anywhere on that road. I find it absolutely confounding that any rain, any snow, will automatically translate to an 80% reduction in speed. It's rated and signed for 60MPH. On those slower days, in that bottleneck stretch, it's more like 10-20MPH, with frequent full stops.

So I just pick a lane, turn up the volume on NPR and go with the trickling flow.

You won't see me darting dangerously and unexpectedly from lane to lane, tapping the horn, flashing the lights, nor flipping off or cursing those that do. I just go Zen.

Winter weather, of course, is a major concern.

A couple of years ago a pretty good storm sneaked up on the area. County and state highway crews were completely unprepared. A few thick inches fell quickly on untreated roads, plows were late, as the storm swelled up and took an enormous dump right before the morning commute. By then the roads and shoulders were clogged and the plows rendered nearly immobile by the inability to get where they were needed. Ask anyone here, they all remember that one.

MoDoT (State Highway Maintenance) and County transportation departments caught hell for weeks, even months over that one event.

Since then, they'd rather juice up the roads ahead of time, even when there's only a slight chance, than be caught with their drawers on the floor again.

And it has been working.

Sure, a drive-time storm is still messy, but the roads are usually well prepared, and the melting starts quick, and usually by the end of day one of snow-mageddon, they're pretty clear.

Our storms usually march up I-44. That's not a coincidence. The highway was carved through the best path through the Ozarks from Joplin to St. Louis, the shorter hills, the wider valleys. The same route that prevailing winds happen to take. Sometimes a bit south of the road, sometimes a bit north, but most of the time the path is clear and predictable.

So on Thursday, as predictions for this second weekend storm in a row started being issued, I noticed that the roads had already been treated. Parallel lines of mystery-solvent (I'm sure it's environmentally friendly ;-) )  traced my entire route.

This weekend's storm was predicted to change from rain to ice/snow about 6 P.M. on Friday. Plow crews were assembling for roaming deployment instructions at 7 A.M. Friday. They were going to be all over this thing, like shame on a reformed prostitute.

I, among thousands of others, appreciate this. We really, really appreciate it.

Five or six years ago I was driving to work during an early December morning mist. The roads were wet, the temperature hovered around the freezing point, dropping slowly.

Spoiler Alert!: The moral of the following paragraph is "Bridges freeze before roadways."

I was tooling along, around 45 MPH, minding my own business, traffic was pretty light. There's a bridge on the southern part of Highway 21 that curves a bit and has a rougher than normal junction with the road. My little truck bounced a little over the bump, which reduced it's grip on the road and it settled back onto thickly glazed-over pavement. This confused my truck. It was so confused that its backside jumped ahead of the front to try to figure it out. This was a bad idea. The driver, that would be me, carefully tried to correct the truck, now sideways, but the truck had another brilliant idea. Dig into a thin strip of non-icy pavement instead. The truck flipped in protest of the sudden traction. It rolled, once, maybe twice, I wasn't counting. I was kind of busy working up a screaming, heaving panic. The truck ended up in the median, on its roof.

This was exactly the second time I'd ever found myself strapped into an upside down vehicle.

I know what you're asking. . . Yes, I did survive, the truck did not.

So I still get a bit twitchy when reports start predicting iffy drive times.

However, this time, the fact that I knew the roads had been treated and the crews were already warming up the plows, made me confident that delays would be minimized, life would resume.

When I say that the roads are usually clear within a day on my route, I mean all of them. Even poor little Klondike Road.

The Driveway.

When I was a kid, if a back road got plowed in good time, or at all, my dad would say: "There must be a politician on that road."

Maybe that's the case on my road as well, all I know is that whatever the reasons, I am quite happy with the hard work and diligence that the various county and state's crews display during these dark dreary, often bitterly, brutally cold days. It is really, really, really appreciated.

Now if they'd only do something about my four hundred foot long, sloping driveway.

So be careful out there! No one, and I mean no one, brags on their headstone about dying while bravely heading to work on a bad weather day.