The Bozeman Daily Bee

I Drive The Speed Limit On North 19th And I Am Not Sorry

The speed limit on North 19th Avenue is 35 miles per hour. I know this because I read the sign. It is a white sign with black numbers. It is not ambiguous. It does not say “35 or whatever feels right.” It says 35.

I drive 35.

Every single day, someone in a truck that costs more than my house rides my bumper like we’re in a draft at Talladega. They flash their lights. They swerve. They make a face I can see clearly in my rearview mirror because they are that close. Then they pass me, accelerate to what I estimate is 50, and arrive at the next red light four seconds before I do.

Montana Supreme Court Justice Pays Traffic Fine; Courthouse Descends Into Existential Crisis

A Montana Supreme Court justice quietly paid a fine for a misdemeanor traffic violation this week, triggering what legal scholars are calling the state’s first “institutional irony event” since a fire marshal’s office failed a safety inspection in 2014.

Justice Marjorie Ashworth, who has spent 18 years interpreting the finer points of Montana law from the state’s highest bench, was cited for a traffic offense the details of which remain mercifully mundane.

I-90 Bridge Closed Until April; Locals on East Side Develop Entire Alternate Civilization

The Bear Canyon bridge on Interstate 90, closed since last Wednesday after a semi hauling an excavator collided with the overpass, will reportedly remain impassable until April, according to the Montana Department of Transportation.

In the six days since the closure, residents east of the bridge have already formed a provisional government, elected a council of elders, and begun minting their own currency backed by the “elk standard.”

“We’ve been cut off from civilization for nearly a week now,” said Harold Dimsworth, a retired plumber from the Bridger Creek area who has assumed the title of Trade Minister. “We’ve rationed the propane. We’re down to our last 14 cases of Busch Light. If the bridge isn’t fixed soon, we’ll have to start drinking IPAs, and nobody wants that.”

The Roundabout Is Not That Hard

You go in. You go around. You come out. That’s the whole thing.

And yet every single day I watch someone stop inside the roundabout. Inside it. As if the concept of yielding to the left has broken their understanding of the physical world. They just stop, in the circle, and look at everyone else like we’re the problem.

Then there’s the blinker situation. If you exit a roundabout without signaling, you are choosing chaos. You are telling every other driver that your plans are a mystery. That’s not driving. That’s interpretive dance.