Feb 17, 2009

The last one isn't the slow one

Sometimes, in traffic, you will naturally start classifying people as
slow or fast. I'm not entirely sure what goes into classifying them,
but you know as well as I do, that you do this. Without going into the
degrees of good-fast versus reckless or good-slow versus
idi-effing-ot, I was thinking about it and I realised that I consider
myself pretty quick through traffic. And for a fair amount of time,
I'm last or nearly last in traffic. Does that describe you too?

I figure that it's because my take-off from the traffic lights and
progress through traffic tends to be on the rapid side, and most of
the time, I catch up with the traffic that's ahead of me. In
traffic/transport planner terms, a group of traffic that leaves
together from a traffic light is called a platoon. Each cycle of
greens causes a platoon. Er, the point is, that I'm usually at the end
of the platoon. Doing what? Passing them, of course. And I'm sure
there's more riders like this out there.

Point? Don't automatically dismiss those at the end of the platoon,
they're probably just taking some time to get ahead. I think this
point has wider meanings that purely in traffic, but that's purely
unintended.