An Aussie geek stuck in Texas

[tag]Metro[/tag][tag]Police[/tag][tag]Houston[/tag][tag]smoking[/tag]

Excuse me sir but can I please check your ticket AND GIVE YOU LUNG CANCER?

Apologies for the blurry photo but I had to snap it in a hurry and get out of there before she realized what I was doing exactly.

For a cop to be in uniform and smoking in public is bad enough but for them to actually be on duty and performing their duty by interacting with consumers while smoking is just completely unacceptable. She was actually smoking in one hand and checking tickets with her other hand, totally unbelievable!

Commuting in Houston is absolutely pathetic, Houston itself is relatively small yet it takes forever to get anywhere and heavens forbid if you ever decide to take public transport to get anywhere.

I was thinking overnight about how I used to commute to Sydney everyday over a distance that would take about an hour to drive when there is no traffic and it would only be about a 45 minute train ride but here in Houston I live less than a 10 minute drive away (without traffic) and it still takes me about the same time to get to work by catching the light rail, it just goes to show how bad the planning really is here in Houston. (Please don’t try to tell me that Houston is so much bigger than Sydney as it isn’t, in the closest figures I could find Houston had 2 million in 2000 and in 2003 Sydney had 4 million, I doubt Houston’s population doubled in 3 years).

I can’t believe how many times the light rail has to stop to let traffic cross the rails ahead of it, how difficult could it be to time the traffic lights so that doesn’t happen? Talking of traffic lights where are all the sensors to monitor traffic and adjust timings to accomodate the current traffic conditions? Where are all the red light cameras to make most Houston drivers poor and lose their license? Why do the traffic lights go out all the time if someone so much as sneezes within 6 feet of them?

Okay so silly me went and thought seeing how the Metro light rail in Houston went right by Six Flags Astroworld that it would be a good option to get there so I looked it up on Google Maps and mapped out the route in my head, which seemed easy enough.

You can guess it didn’t turn out that way though! First we went my mapped out way, which was quite a walk in itself only to get to the entrance of Astroworld to find out that you can only enter via the overhead pedestrian bridge that went across the massive freeway that was next door, so we turn around walk all the way back to the closest way under the freeway, loop back to where we were, then have to enter a CAR PARK to get to the pedestrian footbridge and then finally we were there.

Come on Houston! You just built the damn light rail, didn’t anyone think about planning where people are going to want to actually go on it? I swear this city must be run by imbeciles given the number of bad planning decisions that are made here! Now I’m kind of hesitant to take the light rail to a football match like I had been planning to as on our walks it didn’t look terribly conveinent even to get to Reliant Stadium, which is just retarded from a planning point of view especially if Houston ever wants a hope in hell of hosting the Olympics like I’ve heard a few rumors about.