Sometimes I do suppose deregulation can be a good thing…I guess.
Today while driving along the Garden State Parkway in NJ I fell into one of those driving lapses where you just sort of drone along in traffic, following the crowd of automobiles like just another fish in school when I slowly realized that most other cars were whizzing past me.
I assumed that I must have slowed down while in my reverie and just wasn’t keeping up so I looked at my speedometer and much to my surprise the needle was hugging 80MPH! And here I was the fish out of school, the slow poke in the group.
Wow, I thought, how fast is everyone else going? Used to be that driving from the Jersey Shore to the New York State border at the federal, gas saving, because American needs to be energy independent, speed of 55MPH was a good 2 hours or more; a veritable road trip of tedium and endurance. Now an hour and change will get you there.
Cruising the highways today is more like playing a video game than it is like going for a drive, especially when one has to always be on the ready to dodge the occasional old timer who appears like a lumbering asteroid doing his or her patriotic ole’ 55 in the center lane.
I must admit that getting to where you want to go so much more quickly does make life that much more enjoyable. I know we have technology to thank for that. Back in the old days the car my dad let me drive would have exploded at these speeds!
However, everything has it darker sides too. We’re gonna need more oil and lots of it! And of course eventually the government will probably put an orbiting “Death Star” of a traffic satellite that will tweet me a googled photo of my car in relative position to the earth’s rotation along with a fine electronically charged to my easy pass and the message that I was doing 105MPH in a 65MPH zone for the last 95 minutes so that will be $2085 dollars in fines please!
Until then happy motoring…and please drive safely!
