Friday, March 05, 2004

Wide streets

Asunny warmer day today. I went out for a bit to get some stuff.
The streets around Las Vegas are quite wide - usually six lanes with a center turn lane. Some of the bigger streets have a center island.

This is Rainbow Boulevard looking North. In keeping with the snow theme, you can see the white mountain in the distance. - Las Vegas has about the highest rate of pedestrian vs auto accidents in the country. We have over 70 people a year die from being hit by cars. Several reasons - one is the really rotten drivers. I have never seen drivers this bad anywhere else - speeding, passing on the right, running lights, just about everything you can think of. The other reason are the streets - you can see how wide this one is, and it's typical, but at least there is an island to stand on in the center. The lights are on major corners, either a mile or a half mile apart. The long way to a light makes people run across without walking down to a traffic signal, and thus subject themselves to the cars. Surface streets like this have a speed limit of 45, which means most drivers do 55-60. Try running across six lanes with cars coming from both directions.
On the way I stopped at America's favorite expensive coffee place -

There is one in every state now, and they just opened one in Paris a few weeks ago. The French don't have enough with multiple coffee shops on every corner, now they can get good American expresso.
Ended up at my favorite grocery store in the area, a new Vons about two miles west. The main reason is the size of their fruit and veggie section.

A pretty good selection. A Whole Foods opened a few months ago, and they have a great cheese area, lots of unusual fruits, but for size of the department the Vons is still the biggest. Of course, most of the stuff comes from Chile this time of year (and most of the time), but there are six different types of pears, eight varieties of apples, and lots of other stuff.