is the end slower than the begining?

okay, this one has me baffled…

…and while i agree with JAB that this is all to push toll revenue, i do NOT agree with him in the whole “i’m not gonna pay to drive on the road” thing. after a few bills that might change, but for now not so much.

a brief history:

as i’ve mentioned the fastest road in the nation (and for that matter, the western hemisphere) is mere moments from my house. the highway it “replaced” which i’ve used thousands of time to commute to any number of jobs/social occasions/booty calls in austin got bumped to a sixty-five mile an hour speed limit back in the 1980’s when such a thing became legal. there used to be a speed trap town in the middle of the journey (mustang ridge, again written about here numerous times prior to the archival armageddon of 2008) that slowed you down to fifty-five for a bit, but overall sixty-five was set and eventually even mustang ridge got on board…

…then came the toll road construction. and they dropped ten miles of it down to fifty-five ’cause it was a “construction site”. i’ve mentioned that once or twice. we all thought it would back up after said construction was completed, but they decided to keep it, and even drop it in places, for seemingly no reason save for the obvious – to make paying to be on the toll more appealing.

so far that’s worked on me…but i wanna focus on that “drop it” thing:

right past the last convenience store on the way into town the speed limit drops from slack-jawed fifty-five to parade-like fifty…but then goes BACK to fifty five when you go up the hill that used to mark the beginning of the city limits, only to drop back down as you get more into town, which kinda makes sense…but if you’re LEAVING town you see that fifty-five on the way out, and they don’t drop it to fifty till the other side of the bridge, so traffic north-bound can go five miles FASTER than southbound? that makes no sense – and shows they did it just to make more hop on the toll, and for no real safety reasons.

but it’s gets more fucked up than that, believe it or not…

if you take the easier of the two exits to my place there’s a sign on the exit that marks the exit at sixty-five miles an hour, and then not a damn thing till that fifty-five as you go up the hill into town…but the road you’re meeting up with is the southbound people who were told to go fifty and now i’m plunging into their pool going sixty-five…legally. so how do you know if i just got off the toll, and can legally go sixty-five, or took the cheap way in and should be capped at fifty? i know “membership has it’s privileges” but how the fuck do you know if i’m a paying member or not? or is this the ultimate speed trap hiding behind the “ignorance of the law does not negate your responsibility to follow it?” bullshit?

you know what – this may very well become the first whore bit to transition into a newspaper editorial!