Moved Again
November 10, 2003
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Posted by Aubrey Turner
Just as soon as I got settled into my new house my company moved us to a different location. We’ve left our nice secluded office complex in the country to one on the outskirts of Dallas (in the Farmer’s Branch/Carrollton area). This means that I now have to negotiate some truly annoying traffic. It took me an hour and 15 minutes on Friday (it was raining then) and an hour this morning to get to work. My home office is looking better and better all the time (or front-mounted rocket launchers to deal with the most obnoxious drivers). I think the thing that bugs me the most is that the two main routes to get out of Keller are overloaded (1709 just plain sucks and 114 is under destruction right now with traffic rerouted to the service road). If 114 were fully operational it might be better, but that appears to still be several months away. Anyhow, it means dealing with a lot of stop lights until I can get onto 635 (which is surprisingly good once you get past the 114/121 merge). The stop lights bring out my ire at people who wait for the other car to get fully moving before starting when the light turns green. This causes gaps in the flow and also causes a ripple effect down the line, usually causing those of us at the back of the line to get trapped by the light when it turns red again (because their ripple moves too slowly). It is possible to get more cars through if people would move together (i.e. start moving as the car in front is moving, rather than waiting for the car in front to open up a gap). Of course this would mean paying attention to traffic and we wouldn’t want to interrupt anyone’s cell phone conversation or interfere with putting on makeup…
Categories: Personal Life Stuff
Ouch, that sucks. I used to work in Plano (in the Census 2000 office). The first day, I tried the 121 route, and nearly went out of my skull. The other 180 days I drove all the way out to McKinney (on 380, which was free of destruction back then) and then to Plano down 75.
It was much further as the crow flies, and it still took a good 80 minutes (each way), but was vastly preferable to the headache-inducing traffic situation on 121 and its associated roads. In fact, I grew to enjoy it (at least the 380 part).
Anyway, any chance of taking the “long” way around?
The main problem is that all the routes are jammed if you go after 7:15am. This is mainly because everyone in the suburbs is trying to get into Dallas… This morning I made it in about 45 minutes, but that was only because I left at 6:30am. I suspect that if I left any later than that it’d be worse. So my strategy for now will be to leave very early and work from home a couple of days a week.