Rants/Ravings ranjeet on 17 Apr 2008 10:50 pm
Ways in Which California is Annoying Me
So I’ve been here for about a month, and there are a few things that have started to get under my skin. I can imagine other installments happening in the future, but here’s my top four as of yet.
Traffic
Yeah, yeah, this is an obvious one, but you don’t understand. Or perhaps, I didn’t understand. It’s a combination of having enough people here that there are cars on the road all the time, every day, plus the endless, endless, traffic lights. If you don’t make that left turn light, you might as well turn off your car and take a nap, because it’ll be about 15 minutes before you get your turn again. The stoplight system here is most certainly not a system designed to move traffic quickly and efficiently. It’s designed to piss every single driver off equally so as to maintain a sort of evil fairness. Additionally, California does not believe its drivers can handle a middle turn lane, so there is usually a median dividing lanes and U-turns are often needed to access something on the left side of the road.
It’s amazing how important expressways, interstates, and highways are to getting anywhere timely. It seems like there are no local roads that get you anywhere faster. It’s always faster to take the highway, even if you have to drive 5 miles to get to it. What’s really frustrating is that because of all the stoplights, on many stretches of the road a bike is just as fast. That’s one of the reasons I’m going to start biking to work — when the same bicyclist is matching me stoplight for stoplight over 2 miles of road, I’ve lost one excuse for taking the car, and it mostly just comes down to laziness. And sure, I’m lazy, but I don’t like to admit it.
Streetlights
I’ll toss this in with the traffic. A lot of the streetlights in Santa Clara county have a yellow tinge that is exactly the same color as a yellow traffic light. So if you’re driving at night down a street with stoplights, it’s yellow lights all around. It’s just…disorienting.
Warning Labels
(picture taken without permission from ComplianceSigns.com.)
California has stricter toxicity laws than most states, so levels of chemicals that would be acceptable in most states are illegal in California. However, those laws only apply to new products and buildings. Buildings already constructed get warning stickers. So everywhere I go, I see stickers on entrances, “This building contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer.” There’s an entire section on ComplianceSigns devoted to signs about California Proposition 65. Really, the part I find most annoying is the “State of California” part, like California is privy to knowledge that the rest of the states just cannot comprehend.
Accordion Thingies on Gas Pumps
I have to admit, when I first expressed my exasperation over this, I was actually wrong about it’s purpose. The first time I encountered this, I assumed it was a nanny-state restriction designed to make sure that you don’t leave the gas nozzle dispensing gas in your tank and walk away. That is, it made you stand there and hold the nozzle in, preventing the chance of a malfunctioning nozzle causing an overflow and a potentially dangerous situation. I figured that at some point in time, some person left the nozzle in their gas tank, gallons of gas spilled out, and some endangered rodent accidentally died. But then I was advised that despite the pushback of the corrugated plastic, you can in fact leave the nozzle in your tank while it pumps, no added support needed. And then I looked up some information and, you know, actually looked at the freaking thing, and saw that it’s intended purpose is to capture any evaporated gasoline that might escape from your tank while you are filling up. Yeah, they are preventing that small portion of gasoline from evaporating and contributing to air pollution. I would think this would be an amazingly small contribution to poor air quality, but perhaps when you multiply by the number of cars in California and consider that it’s so much hotter there than Illinois, raising the vapor pressure of gasoline, it actually matters. Given that I’m a newcomer to the state, I guess I can give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, it was probably introduced so that evaporated gasoline didn’t disrupt the mating rituals of a particular coastal moth or something.