Alert reader Morg sent along this cell-phone pic yesterday afternoon:

Morg writes:

I guess this postal carrier thought they worked for UPS, as in Unlimited Parking Spaces. They decided it wasn’t enough to park illegally in ONE handicapped space, so they straddled the line and took TWO!!

Maybe the truck was, you know, on fire, and the driver didn’t have time to think, or, um…

Hmm. Nope. Pretty much inexcusable.

Roadguy is on the road again today, so for your reading pleasure he’s reached into his mailbag and pulled up a li’l something that alert reader Amy sent along a couple of weeks ago:

I had reason to be on Snelling Ave. in Roseville this afternoon. Snelling is all ripped up, under heavy construction, and with the stoplights, traffic was backed up for blocks. While idling away at a red light, I looked over and saw a teenage girl, weaving and swerving on a bike. At first I thought there was something wrong. But no — she was steering with one hand and texting on her phone with the other. Eyes on the phone, of course. In heavy traffic, in a construction zone. I tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe she was just dialing a number, but no, it just went on and on.

My jaw still hurts from where it hit the steering wheel!

Maybe she was texting her legislator to ask whether the texting ban applies to bicyclists…

This morning, some folks from MN2020 held a news conference at the closed Lowry Avenue Bridge to release the results of a survey of the state’s county engineers, who are worried about funding for deteriorating roads. The full report is available here.

While the think-tankers were sharing their thoughts, Roadguy was quite surprised to see this:

Yes, these pedestrians went over the barricades to cross the bridge. (Click to enlarge to see whether it’s anyone you know.) I also took a picture of how they did it, but I’m keeping that to myself — we don’t want to give alert reader Bonnie, who misses walking her dog across the bridge, any ideas.

It’s not good to have pedestrians on an unsafe bridge, but do we really want to resort to razor wire and 24-hour guards? Share any thoughts or ideas below.

It’s been days since we’ve had a photo around here, so here’s one I took on Tuesday:

Both cars were coming east west on 5th Street, which at that point is a one-way and has light rail tracks down the middle. The car in the foreground decided to ignore the “no turns” signs and the straight-ahead green arrow and make a left turn from the right lane. The other car seemed to be behaving appropriately in the left lane but was “in the way” for Mr. Illegal Left Turn, who had to stop on the tracks while everyone figured out what was going on. Fortunately, no trains — which had a green light — entered the picture.

Roadguy has said it before, and he’ll say it again: When you’re in the wrong lane, it’s not the end of the world to go around the block.

Another questionable driving episode turned up in C.J.’s Tuesday column:

Doug Anderson squired Baryshnikov about in lavish wheels supplied by Maserati of Minneapolis, which is owned by Morrie Wagner.

At one point, Anderson says, he was just driving along when he noticed the speedometer was at 109. “You can’t tell how fast it’s going. Felt like you’re doing 50. It really is the smoothest. Unreal,” he said. “I won’t be doing it again, tell you that. It scared me.”

That news scared Maserati of Minneapolis’ GM Barb Bowman, too. “Great. That’s what we want to hear. Our poor loaner car,” she said Monday.

Roadguy immediately thought of alert reader Paul’s treatise from the other day and how a car’s features can detach a person from the driving experience.

Our last item is from alert reader Suz, who writes:

I saw an article recently that might make an interesting Roadguy topic. A researcher at Colorado State Univ. performed a study in which they found a relationship between road-rage and personalizing your car.

Suz notes that you have to have a subscription to Nature to read the whole article, but she found this blurb with more information on Slashdot. An excerpt:

A study by psychologist William Szlemko at Colorado State University in Fort Collins that recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper stickers, special paint jobs, stereos and even plastic dashboard toys to their cars has found a link between road rage and the number of personalized items on or in their vehicle. “The number of territory markers predicted road rage better than vehicle value, condition or any of the things that we normally associate with aggressive driving,” say Szlemko. What’s more, only the number of bumper stickers, and not their content, predicted road rage — so “Jesus saves” may be just as worrying to fellow drivers as “Don’t mess with Texas.”

Szlemko suggests that this territoriality may encourage road rage because drivers are simultaneously in a private space (their car) and a public one (the road). “We think they are forgetting that the public road is not theirs, and are exhibiting territorial behavior that normally would only be acceptable in personal space,” says Szlemko….

So start counting bumper stickers and see what happens. Just don’t get so distracted that you drive 109 on the light-rail tracks.

First, a little something from alert reader Coco:

Thought you might enjoy this beautiful example of parallel parking I found outside my apartment:

Good grief — that’s pretty exceptional. Given the cost of gas, maybe the driver decided to stop right there to save fuel.

There’s also the possibility that the person holds the contrarian view that gas prices aren’t that high — alert reader Matty found a story in Slate titled “Gasoline is Cheap.”

Alert reader BarryS, meanwhile, directs our attention to this USA Today story about freeway removal — Oklahoma City is the latest to join this urban trend. Roadguy was thinking that the Twin Cities largely escaped the elevated-freeway boom back in the day, but BarryS notes a couple of examples:

Oklahoma City is doing something that I wish would happen in the North Loop — removing the highway and replacing it with a park and a boulevard. I’d like to see the I-94 viaducts in the North Loop removed, and 3rd and 4th streets become connecting thru streets.

That’s the catch with elevated roadways — they can be handy to drive on but are unpleasant to live near.

Finally, I got an e-mail from a P.R. firm for Verizon Wireless that offered tips on phone usage in the car; you can view the list here. My favorite was this:

Do not engage in complex, stressful or emotional calls while driving.

Roadguy notes that it’s not so great to have such conversations with your passengers, either.

May your Memorial Day weekend be full of pleasant chatter — and entirely moron-free.

Roadguy almost got run over by a car. As in, “had-to-jump-out-of-the-way” almost run over by a car.

I was crossing Washington Avenue at a crosswalk in Seven Corners. I had the walk signal and was proceeding in the normal manner, between the white lines. Roadguy is admittedly not always this perfectly behaved, but there was a lot of traffic going to and from the 10th Avenue Bridge at lunch hour, so I wasn’t messing around.

As vehicles made right turns behind me, it didn’t occur to me that a car coming from the other way might try to make a left turn into me. But suddenly, there it was, coming at me — and accelerating, completely oblivious that I was in its path.

I jumped forward to get out of the way. As a six-foot-two man in a red parka, I was apparently invisible until I started jumping and swearing, because the driver noticed me at the last second and did some swerving and braking.

And how, you may ask, does a driver not see a six-foot-two man in a red parka until the last second? The answer appeared to be in the driver’s hand: he had a hand-held device with a keyboard and a screen. (I could see it because I was only a couple of feet away.)

Once I was safely on the other side of the street, a guy in a pickup truck called out to me. He’d seen the whole thing. “You should’ve hit him with your bag!” he said. I suppose I could have, but I didn’t want to sacrifice my burrito bowl to make a point. Still, with my adrenaline still racing, it was nice to know that someone was on my side (and would have been prepared to testify).

I managed to write down the license plate number, and I even took a picture of the car when it was stopped at the next light — the guy shrugged at me in a slightly exasperated “look, come on, I’m sorry” kind of way. I know it’s the holiday season, and peace and goodwill and all that, but even a day later, I’m finding forgiveness hard to come by. Maybe y’all can help me look deep into my heart, but geez … my life is more important than his text message.

And if you’ve got a near-miss to share, please do so below.