The Snowflake Chronicles

Driving Distractions

17 Mulk 163 B.E. - Friday, February 23, 2007

It’s amazing how many distractions there are when driving. Today I took aluminum cans to the recycler, while I was driving west on Sahara I encountered one of those advertising signs that is pulled behind a truck. This sign advertised a car dealer ship. I’m not sure which car lot it wanted people to got too. The only time I got a good look at it was at a stop light. Then I wanted to see more but I couldn’t. It was at that point I realized how many distractions there are.

The city buses have advertising on the sides of them, but those are easier to read because the buses have to stop periodically and many of the bus stop are close to the corners. I can read the advertising on the buses while waiting for a green light. Yes, the lights in Las Vegas are long enough to get the idea of the ads on a bus’ side.

Cabs also have advertising on them. They have signs on their roofs and back bumpers. The ads on cabs are easy to read as well, especially if the cab is ahead of me or behind me at a stop light.

Other distractions are the billboards. There are a few billboards at corners where I can read them when I’m at a stop light, but many are on the interstate or in the middle of a block and you can’t read them very well. The best and least advertising I’ve seen here in Vegas are the bus shelter ads. They are big enough to read if I’m in the right lane when stopped at a light. They are also short and to the point.

There are some ads that I don’t pay attention to anymore, but were shocking when I first saw them. Those are the half-naked showgirls. These ads are neither hard porn nor soft porn, but they can be distracting and shocking when you first see them. I remember there used to be a billboard some where in town that showed the bottoms of showgirls. The line of dancers was bent over and wear very little their entire bottoms weren’t covered. That particular billboard always shocked me when I saw it.

Besides the advertising there are the people walking across the middle of the street. At bus stops, instead of walking down to the corner and the light, groups of people will cross when they get off the bus. This doesn’t happen on all the streets or at all the bus stops. I’ve noticed it happens a lot on Charleston and on Boulder highway.

Then there is a little old guy who shuffles, a shuffle may be too fast to describe the way he jaywalks across Maryland Parkway. I noticed him a couple of times in 2005. He usually did this during the noon or evening rush hour. He walked across three lanes, and then stopped in the center turn lane to see how fast traffic was coming. When the cars were stopped at a light he would began to stroll across the other three lanes, but he walked too slow to get across before the cars got too him. Fortunately, no one in the on coming traffic was on a cell phone or otherwise distracted.