When heading north on 360 and connecting to MoPac northbound, you head downhill and hit the bottom near the MoPac overpass. Then you have to drive uphill to get onto MoPac. This hill isn’t a challenge. If I can get up to highway speed in a 22-year-old sedan with a 114 HP 4-cylinder, then your V8 pickups and POS Corollas are more than capable of getting there (maybe if you have one of those 70 HP Smart cars, then you have an excuse). I mean, seriously, you need to be AT highway speed at the end of the on-ramp! It does give me a good excuse to blow out the carbon though. It is quite satisfying to floor it up the hill in third gear while flying past them while still way under the speed limit once we’re all on MoPac (because these idiots are going 40 MPH once they get on the highway). These slowpokes have no business driving.
Tag Archives: highway
US290 to RM2222
US 290 becomes RM2222 at I-35. The first sign you’ll see tells you what lane you want to be in. This is far more descriptive than most of the road signs in Austin already, but the logic is still flawed. Go up a little and the I-35 northbound ramp branches off, but that particular lane continues. The next sign comes up.
Oh snap! If you were in the middle lane and you weren’t paying attention, you would have missed your exit. The middle lane was clearly not an “Exit Only” lane. The left two lanes actually continue to RM2222 which after the interchange becomes a 4-lane city street called Koenig (pronounced KAY-nig) Lane. If you missed the Airport Blvd exit, you will have a helluva time getting back unless you pull a U-Turn when the road becomes undivided. An overhead view shows that there is a rail line that runs parallel to Airport Blvd and there’s no way to cross it until you get to a major street. Good job, guys!
The left lane is not a breakdown lane
The left lane is known as the “fast lane”. It’s a generally accepted rule here in America. You should at least go the speed limit in the left lane. This one moron I encountered today must have missed the memo. This person obviously knew they were having car troubles because the hazards were on. The car was moving at 55 MPH, which isn’t too terribly slow for a disabled vehicle, but it’s still 10 MPH under the speed limit. Now I don’t know why the driver thought the left lane was the appropriate place to be driving because I wished a cop would issue a ticket for an unauthorized parade on a highway because of the backup. Now common sense would dictate that you don’t drive a disabled vehicle on the highway and if you do, stay in the right-hand lane! I don’t even comprehend how driving a disabled vehicle in the fast lane is a good idea.
Unmarked exit on MoPac
Every time I drive north on MoPac I pass this unmarked exit just south of US183. The exit only puts traffic on the frontage road, but the frontage road doesn’t intersect any other road until it passes US183 and gets to Loop 360. Both US183 and Loop 360 have dedicated marked exits so I’m not sure what this exit is for. The exit lane from MoPac becomes the left-most lane on the frontage road, which then becomes an on-ramp for US183 (for northbound traffic coming from Steck Avenue/Anderson Lane/Spicewood Springs Drive). Once on the on-ramp and flyover, the two left lanes are for US183 northbound and a single right lane (the on-ramp lane) becomes the US183 southbound exit lane.
I believe it would be in good intentions if this unmarked exit was marked as the US183 southbound exit from MoPac since it pretty much puts traffic into the US183 southbound exit lane on the flyover anyways. That way there isn’t a giant kerfuffle at the actual US183 exit (people just don’t understand how to maintain their speeds at that point).
On-Ramp Speeds
I don’t understand why people don’t get the concept of getting up to highway speeds by the end of the on-ramp. The inability of people matching traffic speeds is one of the causes traffic jams. By matching the speeds merging would be smoother and easier. Modern cars are fast enough to do that job fairly well so it’s obviously a driver issue. Fifty-five MPH is not a reasonable speed at the end of the off-ramp and if you pull into traffic that is moving at least 65 MPH, you’re now a rolling roadblock. Congrats on being a complete jerk to society. The other day some douche nozzle in a Toyota pick-up had the balls to hawk a loogie at me while I came up behind him AT THE SPEED LIMIT! Some people need to be the next Darwin Award recipient.