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Traffic Week Miscellany: Human Transit, Jump Starts, and, of course, Cows

For my penultimate Traffic Week blog post, I give you these:

1) Transit musings: Try this transportation blog: Human Transit

2) Traffic law sometimes surprises: If you ever were in doubt about the truth of this statement, ?if you read only what is written in the statutes and the constitutions you will be absolutely wrong about what the law is,? let the following be a wake-up call:

KCLL Klues posted this story December 9, 2009 (and more links to WA traffic stories):

Traffic infraction case overturned by WA Supreme Court
?Anyone who has ever tried to find appellate case law on traffic infractions will quickly realize that few traffic infraction cases are appealed to the Court of Appeals and even fewer to the Washington Supreme Court. The attorney fees alone would be significantly more than the initial ticket.

Such was not the case for Seattle attorney Andy Magee. In 2005, Mr. Magee helped out a friend who needed a jump start on an on-ramp on Highway 520 and positioned his vehicle so that it was nose-to-nose with the other car on the shoulder?.? (link to full KCLL Klues post)

3) Cows, Cows, Cows: Cows have leading roles in The Law, from contract law to traffic law to legal research blog cow searches. See Rose of Aberlone (and see also this and this and this), engagement rings and this excerpt from a previous Justice Bedsworth: A Criminal Waste of Space article: Is a Cow a Motor Vehicle?

?Legend has it that the publication of The Great Gatsby pushed Ernest Hemingway into a deep depression. Hemingway is supposed to have confided to friends that he found it difficult to write after reading Gatsby because it had been his dream to write The Great American Novel and Fitzgerald had beaten him to it. Now I know how he felt.

... I set my sights on the perfect paragraph. That seemed high enough to keep people from tripping over and low enough to be doable. I figured I had twelve years before the electorate got wise to me and threw me out at the end of my term, and in that time I should be able to write one perfect paragraph. ...

The Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Appellate District in Portage County, Ohio, did it a few months ago. And now anything I wrote would be a pale imitation of their Gatsby paragraph.

Say what you will about me, I know when I?m beat. Here is the first paragraph of Mayor v. Wedding, 2003 WL 22931354 (Ohio App. 11 Dist.) : "In this case we are called on to determine whether a cow is an uninsured motor vehicle under appellants? insurance policy. We hold that it is not."

How could you improve on that? I mean, that?s ?Call me Ishmael.? That?s ?All happy families are happy alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.? That?s ?It was a dark and stormy night . . .?3 No one could read that paragraph and stop. It is, therefore, not only the perfect paragraph, but the perfect opening paragraph. My desolation is complete?.? (read full article)

Traffic Week and Traffic Law OLR blog posts.

Full post as published by Oregon Legal Research on January 08, 2010 (boomark / email).