ThayerAvenue.com

I’m not sure if it’s actually new, but I was rudely alerted to the fact that there’s a box speed camera in the 9000 block of Georgia Avenue at the southwest corner of Woodside Parkway targeting drivers in the northbound lanes.

Of course, MoCo kindly posts the location of all speed cameras on its web site, but I haven’t really paid attention. Now being $40 poorer, I think I’ll start checking occasionally. All too easy to get up a good head of steam going through there – which I assume is why they put it there. That, and to get people to slow the hell down.

But really, considering some of the driving I’ve seen around Silver Spring, someone should make an idiot camera. It would certainly help the budget issues in the county. Consider yourself warned.

Yesterday the belt that drives both the air conditioner compressor and, by proxy, the power steering pump in my car broke. So it’s hot inside and it’s hard to steer. And even *I* can avoid the new traffic calming/pedestrian island additions to Dale Drive.

A flurry of emails went out on the Queen Anne’s listserv about someone – who claims they were driving carefully – losing a tire on one of these pedestrian islands. How the hell did they not see the big orange cones?

The moral of the story, people: slow the frak down and don’t be such an idiot. People are walking across Dale from downtown to the Sligo Creek area all the time (hear me, l.b.?). And as I recall, the speed limit on Dale is 30mph (25 near the middle school during school hours). If you bust up your car, stop complaining and shut the hell up. It’s your own damn fault.

Thanks to alert neighbor DS for the heads up on this. Someone was shot last night about 100 yards away from my house. Right in the path I take when walking home from downtown. Many thanks to ABC7 news for apparently being the only local news outlet to report this story.

According to the story, the shooting happened around 11:15pm Friday night and took the life of 30-year-old Mark Ray. Witnesses saw a man fleeing the area, but there aren’t many other details. If you walked down the camera angle from the photo for about 60 seconds, you’d probably be in my backyard. This is a little disconcerting, to say the least.

And in other news…

The Washington Post has a story about speed cameras coming to Montgomery County. Our esteemed County Executive was well quoted:

“Unfortunately, we’re here to remind the citizens of Montgomery County again of the need to slow down and observe safety regulations in order to prevent tragedies,” such as the four pedestrians killed in the county during August, said County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) yesterday during a news conference near Wheaton High.

How about the need for people to not jaywalk with a sense of entitlement? Sure, people need to slow down, but not for the sole purpose of being able to stop for some idiot that crosses against a light – or nowhere near a crosswalk.

UPDATE: Right after I posted this, the story on the ABC7 site was updated to say that a suspect has been arrested in the incident. No other details yet.