THE PEOPLE MUST HAVE THEIR DAN MILLER

Okay. So I met yesterday afternoon with Paul Imhoff, the assistant superintendent for Madeira City schools. When I went in, he introduced me to the superintendent as “the route guy”, which I thought was quite funny.

The meeting went well I thought. It seemed like they were really interested in what I might have to offer, as opposed to just humoring some crackpot. Paul provided me with the bus routes for the 2004-05 school year and is going to get me the ones for this year too (he has to get them from the bus company). I’ve still got a few questions and such that came up after I started looking over the routes, but I’m optimistic I can find some ways to help out.

This year, Madeira, next year, THE WORLD!!! MWAHAHAHAHAHA

One of the things that I like to do while driving is to imagine where people are going (or coming from). This is opposed to moving my head back and forth to weave specks of dust in and out of the white lines on the Interstate, which I only do while passengering, since it wouldn’t really be safe to do while driving.

What I mean by imagining where people are going usually involves cars with license plates for other states. Or, occasionally, since Ohio (and Kentucky and a lot of other states) has county markers on their license plates, cars with different county markers.

Yesterday, while I was driving home on 71 southbound just south of Fields Ertel, I saw a car also going southbound with Iowa license plates. I did not catch the county (if there was one, and I believe there would have been as I think Iowa is a county license plate state). Now, I understand that there are several reasons that a car with Iowa license plates could be here in the ‘Nati, besides going to/from Iowa.

• In the military, who don’t have to get new state license plates
• Or maybe they just moved here
• Perhaps they’re visiting family in the area and are just returning from errands or a trip to Kings Island or something

However, as I passed the car, it appeared to be an old woman and old man in there, and it appeared to have lots of stuff in the car, so I’m going to just say they were on their way to/from Iowa. Plus, that makes it part of “the game”. So, I was trying to figure out where they were possibly going (or coming from). I was really having a hard time coming up with possible destinations. I-80 is the major W-E interstate through Iowa. About the only thing I can come up with is that somewhere in the northern Cincinnati area (Mason, Lebanon, etc.) must have been their destination, and they were returning to Iowa.

Here’s the thinking. The route from northern Cincinnati, well, north-eastern Cincinnati anyways to Iowa would have you coming down 71, taking 275 W to 74 West, which hooks into I-80 at Davenport, IA, on the Illinois-Iowa border. I did some mapping / directioning and just general thinking about it, and it appears that Exit 65 on I-71 (US 35) is about the cutoff. Anywhere north of that (or northwest like Xenia) and it becomes a better route to take 35 West to Dayton to 75 N to 70 W. And as you go further north, you can just get on I-70 near Columbus. This leaves, in addition to the areas of northern Cincinnati that I already mentioned, the thriving metropolii of Wilmington, Jeffersonville or Caesar Creek State Park.

So there you have it - anyone else have any other ideas?

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for awhile but just haven’t gotten around to it. I wanted to talk about the various tricks that I use on the road in getting to work. There are 2 major ones, both in/around the Kenwood area, right before I get on 71 North to come to work. The basic route is that I come up Hosbrook Road (usually after driving on one of my favorite-ly named roads, Shewango Way), then turn left onto Montgomery, and then right onto 71.

I have attached an edited image originally from Google Maps of the area, for those of you not familiar with this area. Pardon its crudity - my graphic design skills are limited to MS Paint. I think it serves its purpose well enough though.

First off is a trick I use if there are too many cars queued up to turn left from Hosbrook to Montgomery. It depends day to day on how many cars are lined up, but it can get pretty backed up since this is essentially THE route of choice for anyone in Madeira to get on 71 North. I’ve found that the limit is about 7 or 8 cars before you will not be able to make it through the left turn arrow and have to wait another traffic cycle. About 3 months ago or so, they widened Montgomery from 2 to 3 lanes each way, and in doing so modified the traffic lights. It used to be that the light at Hosbrook did not have an arrow, and it was just a green light and lasted a bit longer. You had to occasionally deal with people trying to go straight on Hosbrook (southbound), but not very often because (although you can’t really see it in the picture) Hosbrook deadends before 71 and there’s just office buildings back there, so the morning traffic coming out of it isn’t very much. So this trick used to apply, just not as frequently as it does now. In any case, when they widened the lanes, for a while we used to get a green arrow on Hosbrook and then when that ended we got a regular green light, which was almost as good, since as I’ve mentioned you don’t often have to yield to straight-folk. After awhile, they probably figured this configuration was causing too much backup on Montgomery (which is the main thoroughfare), so they changed it where now we usually get a green light and arrow and that’s it.

So, if there are more than about 7 or 8 cars, instead of getting behind them in the left turn lane, I go up to the straight/right lane, which usually has 0-2 cars in it (as I mentioned, pretty much everyone just turns left here). Then I go straight on Hosbrook, turn into National City Bank (NCB in the picture), go around the building, through the teller drive-through (nobody’s there because they’re not open yet), and then turn right on Montgomery. Usually this times out to have me ready to turn on Montgomery right after the last car that has turned left, and just before the cars coming straight on Montgomery get the green light. I have pondered if this is illegal or not, and I don’t think that it is. I seem to recall there’s a law against “evading a traffic light” or some such, like if you were wanting to turn right somewhere, and instead of waiting at the light, you cut through a gas station or something. My friends and I always used to do this when I was younger, on the pretext that we were “looking for 95 octane”. When the gas station didn’t sell it (because no gas station sells gas with an octane number that high) we would shrug our shoulders and say “Oh well”, and cut over to the other road. But in this scenario, I am legally following all applicable traffic lights.

In any case, the second trick is one that used to work a lot better before the aforementioned widening of Montgomery Road. First, a little setup. As I mentioned before, most of the cars turning left from Hosbrook are getting on 71. Of course, there are also cars coming NE bound on Montgomery wanting to turn left onto 71 North. Us as right turners have a Yield sign, so the people turning left have a right of way there, if there is nobody going straight on Montgomery. While they were doing the widening, you couldn’t turn left onto 71 here, so there were no problems turning right here. Of course that caused its own problems because instead of following the official detour which was to drive 2 miles north on Montgomery (like who is going to do that?), people would just turn left into Arby’s or Shell (located about where the O and R in WORK is in the picture), then turn around and make a right onto 71.

So, the trick here is that I act like I am going straight on Montgomery. You can make it look this way by not putting your right turn signal on and/or not slowing down like you’re about to make a turn. If you do it right, you can make the left-turning cars pause just enough that by the time they realize you’re turning, you’re ahead of them enough that you can right-turn ahead of them without having to yield. Like I said, this worked a lot better before when there were only 2 lanes each way. Now with 3 lanes, even though the 3rd lane is straight/right (as opposed to right turn only), the left turning cars sometimes just figure that you’re turning and go anyways. Where you get screwed up here is if you get car(s) in front of you that don’t know how to play this trick, so they slow down and let the left-turners go. Once they go and right-turning cars get backed up, there’s really no way to play this game because you have to stop and wait your turn until either the light turns red or a straight guy comes by.

All in all some very fun games that I play nearly every morning. Another by-product of the widening is that there is now a right turn only lane on Montgomery to Hosbrook, which is very handy for the coming home route. But that’s another story…

Pursuant to yesterday’s post, I got an email back from the assistant superintendent. He said that he would “love to meet with me and hear my ideas”. So I got that goin for me, which is nice. I will keep you all posted.

Another post for TPMHTDM!

So, over the weekend, I get a newsletter from the Madeira City School District. Probably like many school districts, MSD walks a fine financial line. We did just pass a bond issue a few years ago, but that was for building new schools to replace our old ones (the schools will be done for 06-07, just in time for Amy to go to kindergarten - how convenient!!)

In any case, the newsletter said something to the effect that the school district was creating a committee to study ways to make the bus routes more efficient, in an attempt to save money. I thought to myself, SIGN ME UP FOR THAT! I sent an email to the superintendent and assistant superintendent asking how I could get some of that action. I mentioned my EFC trip as well as my Madeira bike routes. If they don’t respond, I suppose I will call to follow-up in a few days. Or, the assistant superintendent actually lives just down the street from me, and we know them because their son is in Amy’s preschool class. So maybe I’ll walk down there and see what’s up.

I had actually been thinking, a few weeks ago, about route planning, and how much I enjoy doing things like that. I had been thinking of ways that route planning and such could make money, and consulting with school districts to plan bus routes was actually one of the things I had thought of. I’ll keep you posted!

Okay it’s been awhile but Q102 has caused me to get out of my posting funk again. You may recall a few weeks ago when the madness on the morning show caused me to post.

Today, they had a series of quotes about the Bengals’ loss to Pittsburgh yesterday. One of them was from backup QB Jon Kitna, who was thrust into playing when starter Carson Palmer got injured on the Bengals’ 2nd play of the game. He said something to the effect of “football is a microcosm of life”, talking about how in life you never know what’s going to happen either and how you just have to be prepared for everything, blah blah blah.

So then Jenn, one of the morning hosts, makes some snide remark about how she is just glad that a football player used such a big word (microcosm). Then she asks Jeff if he used it correctly, and he says that he doesn’t know because he doesn’t know what the word means either!

Now, I don’t expect everyone to be a walking dictionary. Just because I know what microcosm means, does not mean that I expect everyone to know what it means. But if you’re going to make fun of someone for using a word, YOU SHOULD AT LEAST KNOW WHAT IT MEANS YOURSELF!!!

To make things worse, Jeff then proceeds to define microcosm completely wrong. Unfortunately, I can’t remember exactly how he defined it, which I realize kind of ruins the punch line to the entire blog posting. But trust me, it was completely and totally wrong and in no way even close.

For all of you playing at home:

microcosm (n.) A small, representative system having analogies to a larger system in constitution, configuration, or development: “He sees the auto industry as a microcosm of the U.S. itself” (William J. Hampton).

And yes, Kitna used it correctly.