Goodbye Greensboro
I never expected it to happen in my lifetime. Yet it has. Yes, you can now bypass that miserable excuse for a city, Greensboro, on I-40. No more Death Valley. No more hour-long waits in a traffic jam with nary a Greensboro police car in sight.
The new bypass leaves the original I-40 in the west near the Colonial tank farm out by the TIA (Triad International Airport), goes around Greensboro to the south, and rejoins the original I-40 to the east before the Gibsonville exit. You cannot even see downtown from the bypass. Perfect.
I took the new bypass for the first time on Friday and it gave great pleasure. Of course, I encountered a traffic stoppage on the original I-40 about two miles east of the bypass. A big Mercedes-Benz had rubbed all four of its corners off on the New Jersey barrier in the median. My guess was that the event was a premeditated parting shot by Greensboro just to remind us all that they were still there.
Lintheads.
The new bypass leaves the original I-40 in the west near the Colonial tank farm out by the TIA (Triad International Airport), goes around Greensboro to the south, and rejoins the original I-40 to the east before the Gibsonville exit. You cannot even see downtown from the bypass. Perfect.
I took the new bypass for the first time on Friday and it gave great pleasure. Of course, I encountered a traffic stoppage on the original I-40 about two miles east of the bypass. A big Mercedes-Benz had rubbed all four of its corners off on the New Jersey barrier in the median. My guess was that the event was a premeditated parting shot by Greensboro just to remind us all that they were still there.
Lintheads.
Never thought much about Greensboro, but I've never been held up in traffic there, either. So why are you so down on Greensboro? What do you think about Winston-Salem? Maybe you should do a post of your opinions of cities. It would be enjoyable reading, if unenlightening.
ReplyDeleteOh, there's nothing really wrong with Greensboro per se unless, of course, you are, like me, from Winston-Salem, in which case you are never to say a kind word about the city that stole the airport and that, while the CFO was in school at UNC-G, gave me more traffic citations than the law allows. It does have road problems, however. A lifetime, or two, would be required to learn to get around Greensboto without s road map. They've got roads that are going west when you begin and east when you end! (It is Raleigh inside the beltime on steroids!)And, that old stretch of I-40 and I-85 around the city was a disaster from Day One, with too many traffic on it even before it was finished. To me it was North Carolina's version of the beltime around Washingtonm DC.
ReplyDeleteI should have guessed that "Leinback" was a W-S vs. Greensboro thing. When I was a kid, I was PR for the W-S Chamber. We were tickled when the Greensboro paper ran an editorial criticizing the state for allowing I-40 to go through W-S because it showed off the city so much better than I-85 showed off Greensboro. But there was much less traffic in the late 1960s.
ReplyDeleteI worked with Ted Leinback, comptroller, when I was PR for the schools in the 70s. A wonderful, kind man. Wife's name was Kaka. Any relation?
Bob Jann
Ennice