Posts tagged as "cars" - Chris Hardie

As a part of the trip to Oregon, we took the opportunity to see some sights along the way, including Yellowstone National Park, Mt. Rushmore, Grand Teton National Park, and neat little towns like Deadwood, South Dakota. The most memorable and terrifying part of the trip was our stop at Badlands National Park.  We should have known something was brewing when the gas station a few miles outside the entrance to the park was all atwitter with talk of the weather and the ominous storm clouds in the distance,...

For over a year now, I've lived less than a mile away from my company's office in downtown Richmond, Indiana.  And for the first time in my life, on most days I get to and from the office by walking instead of driving.  It's been a really enjoyable shift, and one that I hope I never take for granted, given how much of the rest of the country commutes to work every day. Some observations on walking to work: Since walking has become my usual mode of commuting, I've found myself noticing even...

Today I learned that the back seats of Ohio State Trooper cruisers are not at all designed for people like me with long legs.  In fact, to fit in it at all so that the officer could close the door to lock me in and take my statement, I had to sit nearly sideways!  You'd think that if someone is already being put in the back of a cop car, there's enough difficult stuff going on in their lives such that a little bit of leg room is in order. About 45 minutes before I found myself in this situation,...

The Palladium-Item reported last night and again today that Earlham College appears to have won an initial victory in getting a traffic signal placed at a critical crossing point on US-40, the 4-lane highway that runs in front of its campus here in Richmond. The Quaker college has tried for decades to get a traffic signal at its entrance, an effort that began soon after Earlham student David Rantanen was killed crossing the highway in 1962. Since then, two more people have died and several more...

Over at ProgressiveWayneCounty.org, I just posted the list of alternative transportation goals for Richmond, Indiana that I came up with in March as a part of my work on the committees that are implementing Richmond's Comprehensive Plan. Comments and feedback welcome (there or here).

You may know about the ongoing conversation about safe bike riding in Uptown Richmond (the business district). At the end of last year, there was a nice improvement when signs that appeared to prohibit biking on that stretch of Main Street came down. I had an interesting related exchange today while walking on the sidewalk. A young man on a bike was riding on the sidewalk, headphones on, coming toward me quickly, and I saw him at the last minute with barely enough time to jump out of the way: Him:...

I saw an article today about New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg's plan to introduce an $8 congestion fee for drivers who enter Manhattan below 86th Street. As someone who lives in a town where they'll just about pay you $8 to enter the downtown area, I'm not too worried about this trend reaching me anytime soon. But the plan itself is in reaction to a premise that drives so much of our economic development conversations these days: "Advocates [of the fee] say it's crucial for a city that's...

I remember going to renew my car registration at the Indiana BMV several years ago, and in a moment of vanity, asking about getting one of those personalized license plates. I was thinking maybe "SUMSALT" or "WEBPRO" or "TALLGY" or the like. But when they said it would be at least an extra $40 because of the costs of producing the special plates, I decided this was an area of my life where I was perfectly fine being just another number in the system. I guess I understood that it cost the state...

On Monday the problems with the brakes on my car got bad enough that I would need to take it in for service, and a new rattling noise developed that sounded like the front left tire was going to fall off. It was "billing" day and the Windows computer processing invoices froze up at the key moment where all the invoices were going to be printed. On Tuesday I took the day off from work and all the tech support and technology management that goes with that. On my day off I ended up helping to troubleshoot...

While I was in Chicago this past week for the professional technical conference some of us from Summersault were attending, we were walking to dinner one night and witnessed the driver of an SUV come within inches of hitting a cyclist. Despite the fact that the driver was rushing to turn through a yellow light, in typical big-city style, the driver of the SUV had the additional gall to yell at the cyclist to look out where she was going and then speed off. The biker was shaken up a bit but carried...