January 12, 2015 It’s a bad day for anyone commuting from Marin County —or Sonoma, or Mendocino, or Humboldt— to San Francisco, or vice versa. The Golden Gate Bridge now has movable center-divider panels that are supposed to make traffic flow more efficiently. The Bridge bureaucrats claim that the panels will shave off only six inches from each adjoining lane. But I’m told that ABC’s Vic Lee, a real reporter (as opposed to a purveyor of press releases), took a tape measure to a section and said it actually took up 12 inches on each side. Everyone else in the media is repeating the “six inches” lie put out by the authorities.
What’s the marijuana connection? We see the center divider as a metaphor for the “new, improved” drugs that replaced cannabis and turned out to have serious adverse effects. We predict more vehicular accidents and huge traffic tie-ups as the dividers are slowly transferred from lane to lane each afternoon. We hope we’re wrong. —Cassandra Jones
