One of the nicknames for I-285 in Atlanta is the Watermelon 500 because people drive so fast on it. It was not unusual when I still worked for IBM for me to drive 80 to 85 on the way to and from work and that was just keeping up with traffic. What with part of I-85 shutdown a lot of the traffic moved to I-285 and clogged it up. For example, I drove to Columbia South Carolina Saturday to spend Mom’s Day with my sister. Because of the traffic it took me forty minutes to get from my house to I-20 because of all of the traffic on I-285. It was stop and go a lot of the way. I was able to make up a lot of the lost time on I-20 by jumping into convoys of people driving 85-90 mph. As a result, what normally takes 3.5 hours, I did in 3 hours 40 minutes. I-85 opened up over the weekend and coming home today, I-285 was back to normal and I made it from I-20 to my house in a little under twenty minutes.
Woo hoo! The Watermelon 500 is back to normal!
Reminds me of when the Torrance CA police department came under
attack for some indiscretions over the police band radio.
One was for using the term “Male usual” to describe certain urbanite
suspects. The other was their nickname for the Harbor Freeway. Said
urbanites would drive down the freeway into the South Bay area, commit
a robbery and fly back home on the “Nairobi Freeway.”
The cops were ordered to stop using these terms.
Sounds kinda “seedy” to me.