Caffiend IV

Today's Runner Up:

Highway 40, The Met.

Pah, how bad can it be? A road as an Extreme Sport?? Well.. Here's the thing. I live in a major Canadian city that is quite old. And this old city has some equally old roads. The antique highway I speak of was built in the 1940's. It was created to carry cars that had an average speed of 40mph and no suspension to speak of. And far, far fewer of them. Now, whirl this old ribbon of asphalt into the year 2008, where my car abides, it with the comfortable cruising speed of 80 to 120mph and the ability to run circles around it's own sassy self should it choose to do so. Thankfully, this ability saves my ass on a daily basis. I use it to avoid being crushed to death by tanker trucks and to avoid being flipped over cement walls.

The highway, for most of its inner-city length, is suspended about 20 feet in the air. This makes the asphalt colder, icier, and far slipperier than the roads connecting to it, giving one a false sense of control as one rides up the on-ramps. Once you leave the relative safety of the side roads and hit the raised section, you realize that up here all bets are off, careless drivers abound, and your life hangs in the balance. Your tires lose traction faster. Your escape routes are non-existant. If someone cuts you off, there is not much you can do about it, swerving means certain death if you hit the ski ramps. More on the ski ramps soon.

This raised highway to hell is called The Métropolitain by the locals, and consists mainly of three narrow lanes in both directions, with cement medians preventing you from falling off of it. No shoulders to pull over onto, should the occasional fool run out of gas (weekly) or have car trouble (bi-weekly) or become involved in an accident (geezus, people). The resulting backlog has to dribble around the offending automobile(s) until the police and 15 towtrucks show up, slowing traffic considerably, raising stress levels to match. Independant towtrucks, fortunately, are never too far away and are quick to remove the offending vehicles. I don't know how they manage to show up so fast, I think they hover like buzzards around a dried up watering hole, invisible until something looks like it's gonna die.
Like buzzards, they are quite efficient at what they do, which is fine by me.

The rainwater that falls on this highway is supposed to run off through an antique drainage system that leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The drains seem to be constantly blocked. This results in large puddles of water collecting in splashy pools along its entire length. Try hitting a 4 inch deep body of water when you are doing even a mere 30mph on black ice. Montreal drivers have nerves of steel.

On a side note the Decarie section of highway is below sea level, and one day water levels rose higher than the hoods of peoples cars after an afternoon storm. Some poor guy drove a wheel into a sewer after the manhole cover was pushed off by the force of the water coming up from below. He was angry. :P So were the people sitting on the roofs of their cars waiting to be rescued. The towtrucks would not venture anywhere near them and rescue teams had to be sent. I'd have been pissed, too, but I can swim, so no big deal. Montrealers took it in stride, and kept on truckin.

Back to the ski slopes. In winter, the cement medians along the raised section get snow packed up against them, melting occasionally, re-freezing, creating little ski-jump slopes along the entire length of the highway. Someone sued the city once because their families car lost control and hit one of these icy snow ramps and shot up over the cement wall, flipped in midair, and landed upside down 20 feet below on the service road, killing all inside instantly. The public was enraged. Complaints were made. The city learned a valuable lesson. Now every month the entire highway is closed off so the city workers can clear the snow away from the cement walls to prevent such a thing from happening again. In the meantime, we gotta take the side streets. This inconvenience has resulted in people get their panties all in a bunch, even though they were the ones complaining about the risks. Fools. Speaking of courtesy, and I must, I notice that driver courtesy has slipped in the last few years. Sad thing, if you ask me. Now people just cut you off without so much as a middle finger salute. I miss that. It meant they were aware I existed..now I just feel invisible. Kinda scary, but I guess I'd make a good towtruck driver :P

Back to the driving. Now let's discuss the bigass trucks blasting along at 70mph in lanes only one foot wider than the average car. The speed limit along this patch of highway is only 50mph...out-of-town truckers do not seem to realize the danger they are in and whip along at the speed of light. If a flatbed truck happens to be hauling a bulldozer, you ain't passing it unless you use up a lane and a half to go around it. And if the driver can't stay in the middle of his own lane, he'll take up some of yours, but that's okay, more Montrealers need to learn how to share, anyways. If a truck decides to change lanes, you better haul your ass out of the way, cuz he's coming over whether you like it or not. And whether he sees you or not..and whether or not it involves crushing you up against a cement wall or running you up onto a ski slope take-off, giving you enough speed to make Don Garlits proud.

If you can survive the trucks, do not underestimate your fellow drivers. The angry, stressed, frustrated, irritated, late-for-work, rude-ass drivers on their way through town on a highway that was never intended to support this kind of traffic in the middle of a busy city. My favorite part is where the highway splits in two directions, leaving the driver in the middle lane to decide which way he is going...left, or right? Sometimes they cannot decide, and pull back in front of you just as you speed up to pass them. Lovely! Thereby forcing you to head straight for the icy ski ramp in the middle of the road and the inevitable lift-off... The last time this happened to me, things were complicated even further by the huge truck beside me that splattered my windshield with icy slush, blinding me completely and forcing me to turn the wheel and follow the curve of the road using only memory. Having traveled this highway a million times, I managed it. I can only hope such a thing never happens to someone without such experience, they'll be flipping in midair and collecting a nice tidy sum from the city.

We take our highways in stride, but you can tell when out-of-towners are driving along. They go too goddamned slow. I remember years ago one of my boyfriends telling me he would not even drive on this highway, that it was a nightmare and a death trap. And that he would not come to visit me because of it. I had to go pick him up and drive him into town! Hahaha! What a pussy. Well, what do you expect, he was from Toronto. >:]

When it storms, the plows don't bother with the Met, they know we can plow it ourselves by building up enough speed on the on-ramps and immediately throwing our cars into well-controlled, ice-enabled Tokyo drifts. Hands down, this highway is an Extreme Sport. I risk my life every single day just driving to work. Piece of cake, baby. Piece of cake. Granted, if I ever stop blogging, you'll know why: the ski slopes got me.

Might as well go out screamin.