do i have the need for speed?

i don’t get on the toll road very often…

…but when i do, it’s ’cause i wanna go fast. not ricky bobby kinda fast, just faster than austin’s bullshit traffic will allow. while most cities wanna be number one in SOMETHING, austin has managed to achieve it as the most traffic-congested mid-sized city in the country. for several years in a row. the solution? they built a toll road – the problem? getting to it from most areas of the city takes more time than taking the toll saves.

but when it’s right there and i can hop on it, i tend to.

but the other day i took it quite a ways (around fifty miles or so) making the journey from round rock back to lockhart. to get from the heb i was at to the intersection of the toll and highway 183 took just shy of thirty minutes – about half what it would take in austin traffic. sure, you spend a few more bucks (five or six) and drive a few more miles (seven) but you get there in half the time. what was odd was i was flying past EVERYBODY on the road, and i was only going eighty. now, the reason i put “only” in front of that is because the posted speed limit is seventy-five and i was always taught that as long as you stay only around five miles over the posted speed limits nine outta ten cops won’t hassle you – and i’ve past enough radar-gunning police officers doing so to feel this this accurate…

…so why did i feel like a nascar champ the other day “flying” along at eighty with the top down?

i can’t remember if the speed limit’s always been seventy-five on there – for some reason i’m thinking it USED to be seventy, and if they’ve only recently bumped it up and most of the other cars on the road were “regulars” than that might account for it.

what was really funny was i passed a car on the toll going eighty in a seventy-five only for the same car to pass me like i was standing still in mustang ridge (a notorious speed trap town between austin and lockhart) when i was going sixty-three in a fifty-five. so they won’t do five miles over the speed limit where it’s barely patrolled but they’ll go fifteen to twenty over where people get pulled over all the fucking time?

white people make NO sense to me…