Stupid

I hate driving in Utah. Normally its the other drivers that make me insane, but sometimes its the people in charge of the roads. For example, anyone that's ever been a passenger in my car driving north out of Salt Lake has heard my rant about how freeways should never have lanes that end in merges, especially left lanes (I think the only lane terminations should be exit only's so that even if you find yourself in a lane that ends, you're not 'forced' to cut off someone else in order to avoid driving off the road). Today's kudos go to the Utah State Highway Patrol. So, first, this happened:

Video Courtesy of KSL.com (or read about it here)

You just gotta love winter driving (read: some people shouldn't have a driver's license in general, let alone in adverse conditions). So anyway, they set up this detour that everyone gets to take:

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Notice that lefty at the north end that you have to take to get back to I-15. That's the only really significant light along the whole detour. As I followed the detour, I saw patrol cars all over the place, keeping order, stopping cars so that locals could turn out of this ridiculously bad traffic jam, generally being useful... until that one left turn. There's only one left turn lane for 11 miles of 2 lane traffic and we all know how short the green is on those. No officers anywhere near that intersection. No efforts to see that they've created a huge backup of traffic, that might have been relieved with a little attention. An hour and fifteen minutes later, I got back to the freeway was already full of cars who had arrived after the detour was lifted. Way to waste my life UDOT.