• Listening to new Vertical Horizon. Hope their tour makes it out to SoCal – the last concert we saw was really good. #MusicMonday #
• Got honked at because I actually stopped before turning right at a red light & paused half a second to see if the pedestrian at the corner would step in front of me. #
  

We were driving back from Los Angeles Saturday night around 11:30pm. You might think at that hour traffic would be relatively light. Not so: it was Saturday night, after all, and the route we were taking (101 south to 5 and onward) went straight through Downtown LA. By the time we merged onto the 5 we’d already been delayed by several slowdowns from accidents. It was a bit past midnight when traffic just…stopped.

We waited, figuring it was another round of stop-and-go traffic. And waited. A fire truck quietly worked its way along the right shoulder. After a few minutes, I put the parking brake on.

But the funny part was the driver of the car next to us.

He looked like he was probably around 20, and was driving an SUV with a sunroof. After a few minutes of dead stop, he opened the sun roof — this was midnight, remember — and climbed up on top of his car to see what was going on.

Then he got back down, opened the door, and walked around to the back of his truck so he could get his camera…and his guitar.

Next step: He handed the camera to his friend in the passenger seat, then walked out in the middle of the lane to pose by the car in front of him, giving a double thumbs-up sign and a goofy grin. As far as we could see, he didn’t actually end up playing the guitar.

I expect the photo is probably on Facebook or Myspace by now…somewhere.

All I’ve got are some blurry photos of the dashboard and the cars ahead.

Oh, and the traffic break? Not surprisingly, it turned out to be an accident. Once we started moving again, we passed an area where several lanes were blocked off…and a car was propped up on its side.

I hope the driver pulls through.

The accident shut down the 5 freeway for most of the day Thursday. We were fine since we drove down yesterday, but a lot of people coming from the LA/OC area or farther north — including my parents, a lot of panel guests, and the driver with all those copies of Comic Book Tattoo — were stuck in the traffic jam for hours. It took us about 2 hours yesterday, including navigating the downtown streets to find our hotel during rush hour. My parents, coming from roughly the same distance today, made the drive in 6½ hours.

The problem is there just isn’t another way to get from there to here. Between Anaheim and Oceanside, there’s only one route inland, the Ortega Highway, and it’s a twisty little mountain road. And there’s miles and miles of freeway bordered on one side by the ocean and the other by Camp Pendleton. Naturally, it was in the middle of that stretch that the accident happened.

(Link via aeryncrichton)

I was on one of those giant, arcing ramps connecting one freeway to another, and noticed that the car in front of me (a PT Cruiser, I think) had something flopping around on its side. It quickly became clear that it was the gas cap, still tethered to the car, with the open flap above it. As we both merged onto the next freeway, I contemplated: how could I tell the driver?

On city streets, I’d try to pull up next to the car at a red light, roll the window down, wave, maybe honk the horn, and then say, “Your gas cap is open.”

But on a highway with no stopping points, at a speed where safe driving distance would keep us out of earshot?

I thought about honking the horn. But what good would that do? A horn only says one thing: “Hey!” Sure, you can vary it a little to give it a sense of urgency — “Hey! Hey!Hey!” “Heeeeeeeey!!!!!!” But it doesn’t allow much for specifics. I suppose you could try Morse code, but I wouldn’t count on most people being able to understand it — I’m an Eagle Scout and I only remember 4 letters — and it would take too long to spell out a message anyway.

Should I try to get in the next lane, match speeds, wave, and try to point to the back of the car? No, that didn’t seem safe.

Flash my headlights? No, that had the same problem as the horn. Too vague.

Outside of the basics (turn signals & brake lights) and a few standard signals (flashing the brights to tell someone you’re passing) — there really isn’t a good way to tell another driver something specific, like “Your lights are off,” “You’ve got a coffee mug on your roof,” or “Stop trying to crawl into my trunk.” Which I suppose is just as well, judging by a random sampling of bumper stickers and the way people treat other drivers. The enhanced road rage might cause more hazards than the enhanced communication would solve.

As for this morning’s PT Cruiser, I eventually I saw it move over to the shoulder. I guess there must have been a warning light on the dashboard.

On a related note, 9 months of driving a Prius has given me a somewhat different perspective on “good” and “bad” mileage. When I see averages of 38–48 MPG over the course of a tank of gas, and can get up to 60 MPG on straight, flat stretches of freeway, advertisements touting 25–30 MPG just don’t sound that enticing.

According to Katie, this actually said “quick sins” the previous time we drove past it!

This shot almost cost us our new car. The sign faces the freeway, and rather than stick Katie with shooting from a moving vehicle at night, I tried to find a good angle from the parking lot. We saw that the lot extended far enough to see around the corner, and headed for the end of the lot. As I prepared to turn into the last space on the end, a truck came zooming around the corner of the next building over, a Carl’s Jr. with a drive-through and absolutely no visibility. Clearly they weren’t expecting to see anyone in the lot at 10:00 at night. Fortunately we both stopped in time.

Also, I now know that the horn works.

Thoughts on the Car

Very smooth, very quiet ride. Lots of nifty little conveniences, like the fact that it remembers different volume levels for radio vs. the line-in jack (for the iPod). Far roomier inside than it looks. Oddly enough, I think it may be wider than the old car.

Not big on the hatchback, though I’m getting used to it. Cargo space is limited, though it makes very efficient use of the space it has. Lots of extra little compartments, hooks, etc. Cup holders are a bit too loose* for most purposes, including my travel coffee mug (yeah, big deal, I know).

Driving it

I’ve found myself changing the way I drive. I used to focus on maintaining stopping distance. Now I’m focusing on making the most efficient use of acceleration. The Prius dashboard displays the point MPG, and a graph of 5-minute averages over the past half-hour. It makes you acutely aware of which actions are most efficient.

It switches between gas and electric motors automatically, and recharges the battery while driving. The electric motor does well at low speeds (say, parking lot driving), and at maintaining speeds up to 40 MPH on smooth, level roads. It can’t accelerate much, so that triggers the gas engine. The gas engine runs around 40–60 MPG while maintaining a constant speed. Coasting & idling are free, since it can instantly turn the engine off and on as needed. (This can be disconcerting at first, because it feels like the car is stalling.) Accelerating, on the other hand, ranges from around 5–25 MPG.

So I’ve been adjusting my driving style to minimize time spent accelerating. Instead of constantly speeding up and slowing down, I get on the freeway, accelerate as quickly as I can until I match the flow of traffic, then hit cruise control. On downward ramps, or heading into a red light or stop sign, I’ll coast. If I’m going to stop anyway, getting there 5 seconds earlier isn’t going to help. Stuck in traffic? If the car ahead moves one car-length, there’s no need to jump into the gap. I’ll creep forward slowly and let it use the electrical motor.

It’s also changed the way I react to different types of traffic. It used to be that as long as traffic was moving at a decent clip, I was happy, and when it got ridiculously slow, I was annoyed. But now, slow traffic isn’t quite so bad (unless I’m in a hurry), because at least I’m running silent and smogless. And while fast, constant traffic is ideal, traffic that oscillates between 50 MPH and 70 MPH is maddening, because I can’t just set the cruise control; I have to slow down and speed up over and over again.

Mileage

The shift in driving style does seem to help. The first tank** of gas, the onboard computer estimated about 38 MPG, and the classic fill the tank and divide by the trip odometer method estimated 33. The second tank (with a 50-mile-each way highway trip), the estimates were 43 and 40. Since then it’s settled into roughly 41-44 MPG overall. That’s about twice what we were getting with the old car, which averaged about 20 MPG during normal commuting, though it did manage to average 30 MPG going to Las Vegas and back last March.

Speaking of mileage, the first 5 minutes always seem to suck. As near as I can tell there’s a warm-up period of some sort, because it always insists on running the gas engine under circumstance that I know it could handle on the electrical engine.

For the record: Daily commute, 15 miles each way. About half of that is suburban city streets, and half freeway. Plus occasional drives to lunch, errands, etc.

Bottom Line

It’s a nice car, and I’d recommend it for anyone who mainly does city and highway driving with 1–4 people, unless they rarely drive more than 5 minutes at a stretch. And as I mentioned, cargo space is limited, so I wouldn’t suggest a family of four take it on a cross-country vacation.

Notes

* Curse the Internet. I’ve seen lose written as loose so many times that I overcompensated and started to write loose as lose.

** To be more precise, the first ¾-tank. I’m refueling when it hits 2 bars on the gauge, and the first two times, I put about 8.5 gallons into the 11.9-gallon tank. The first time it was around 280 miles, the second around 340. The dealer said they’d filled the tank up, and it showed as full, but it’s possible they stopped at the point where it would register as full.

I had this post in mind when I read about Blog Action Day, and figured I’d just make sure I finished it and post it on the right day. Eventually I realized it wasn’t quite on topic, but I had some thoughts about California’s water crisis bouncing around in my head, so I ended up writing that instead.

So I went to Starbucks on the way to work. The woman at the cash register wrote my name down as “KALSLN” despite the fact that I spelled it out loud to her. I suppose I should be grateful she got more than half the letters right. I’m always amazed at the new and surprising ways people find to misspell my name, though. If I’d been more awake, I would have added my usual “like Nelson with a K.” Of course, if I’d been more awake, I wouldn’t have stopped for coffee.

The rest of the drive was uneventful until I was ready to get off the freeway. Remember The Turn Signal Is Your Friend? Here’s another one. There was a pack of cars in the right lane, all about three carlengths apart, and I needed to get over to reach my exit. Unfortunately the gap I picked was in front of a Mercedes, who refused to open the gap at all. So this guy is tailgating me, barely a carlength behind, at 65 MPH. Last I looked, stopping distance at that speed was a whole lot longer than that. We reach the ramp to the next freeway, which is a cloverleaf, and my blueberry muffin rolls out of its bag onto the seat, spilling crumbs everywhere. Now, at this point I have to get over one lane immediately in order to be able to turn left at the real exit, but there’s a huge truck in that lane. So I pass the truck, start signalling, start to move over – and this jerk (who has never dropped more than a single car length behind me the entire time) not only zooms into the next lane and starts to pass me, but starts honking at me. Note that I started signalling before he passed me! I slam on the brakes (which, if he’d still been behind me, would have guaranteed a collision) and honk the horn, and the muffin (which I’d fortunately rolled back into its bag) rolls forward, hits the underside of the dashboard and lands on the floor.

To top it all off, a construction crew was blocking the left turn lane, so I may as well have stayed in the right lane.

Here’s hoping the day gets better and not worse…

Turn signals prevent other drivers from hitting you! (Or at least reduce the chances of it.)

I am amazed time and time again as I see people driving shiny new Mercedes, Lexuses (Lexi?), and BMWs dodging in and out of traffic without signalling, trusting those below-average other drivers to have above-average reflexes and precognitive abilities.