I saw the most bizarre thing on the way to work this morning. I was
driving on city streets, in Reston, Virginia. As I came to a red light I
stopped with several cars in front of me, but still had a pretty clear view of
the opposing direction of traffic. The street was two lanes in each direction
with both right and left turn pockets. At the front of the line coming back
toward me, in the left-hand straight lane, there was a VDOT or road-worker's
truck. A guy hopped off it and placed a cone in the middle of the left turn
pocket, just behind the crosswalk. As he was doing this, a couple of cars
behind him pulled over into the turn lane. Since he placed a cone directly in
front of the first car, and she didn't seem at all bothered, this caught my
attention, so I looked more.
As I went through the intersection, I noticed that the entire left-turn
pocket was coned off but there were about 6 cars in it. I'm pretty sure that
the cars at the end of the line didn't realize that the first car had a cone
smack-dab in front of her, but surely they noticed the cones running along
between the lanes! Apparently every one of them squeezed between the cones
and pulled into the turn lane.
As their light turned green, the work truck threw on it's signal to
make a right turn (from the left lane, of course) and nearly got hit by a van
behind it as it crossed in front of two lanes of traffic to make it's turn.
I SOOOO wanted to just park and watch and see what they were going to
do, but I had to get to work. I wonder how long it took them to get out of the
coned-off area...

- Sharon
"Gravity... is a harsh mistress!"