First, a little something for the safety-minded driver. Two people — alert reader John and one of Roadguy’s many bosses — sent along this link to a new MSNBC web page that allows you to enter a route and learn about the inspection history of the bridges you’ll encounter along the way. Roadguy played with the page for a bit, and while it’s not as user-friendly as Google Maps (you can’t grab routes and move them, for one thing), it’s pretty interesting. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the software is well aware that the 35W bridge isn’t there.

Our other mailbag offering today comes from the lighter-moment department, and who doesn’t need a lighter moment after 36-odd hours of below-zero temperatures? Alert reader Karen directs our attention to this page, which, while not remotely new, was (perhaps unsurprisingly) new to Roadguy. It’s about a man who grew tired of all the horns honking outside his apartment, resorted to haiku and wound up publishing a book “for the frustrated motorist in all of us.” As a longtime worshiper of Batgirl, Roadguy knows that haiku and blogging go hand-in-hand. So if you have a good 5-7-5 poem about local transportation lurking in your head, please add it in the comments. I’ll probably post more of my own later in the day as my brain wakes up, but here are a few to get things started:

Behold the loop ramp!
It makes drivers so dizzy
that they cannot merge

Those “share the road” signs
confuse many a driver:
“Huh? It’s not all mine?”

The Wakota Bridge:
Will it be done by the time
Roadguy retires?

You get the idea, and no doubt can do better, so click below.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 6:05 am and is filed under Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.