A traffic cone appeared in the middle of my road

Duke said:

note to 27-years-ago-me:  put another $20,000 in the house budget for a better location, trust me, it will work out

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure applies to many unexpected facets of life.

We live next to a middle school on a 1 block long residential 25 mph road with no sidewalks. The number and speed of cars rushing their snowflakes to and from school is crazy. An estimated 50 mph is not unheard of on this short street.

Even worse, while the gates open at 9:15, cars begin to stack up and down the street sometimes as early as 8 am waiting for the gates to open. What the hell, people?! Do you not have a home to wait in? I've very nearly had an aneurysm at times because cars will literally block the road trying to zipper into the gates.  That's the road I go to and from work, BTW. 

Driven5 said:

Duke said:

note to 27-years-ago-me:  put another $20,000 in the house budget for a better location, trust me, it will work out

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure applies to many unexpected facets of life.

Agreed... but when I was 28 and had a 13-month old baby, the thought of borrowing an extra $20,000 was terrifying.

Luckily for me the traffic exspress is one block over behind my house aside from the large group of teenagers that started renting a 5 bedroom house on my block. They feel the need to floor there straight piped trucks leaving home and leaving the stop sign 30 yards from my house. My kids have already had one run in with a bunch of them playing football in an empty lot. Football ended up on the edge of the road and one of the teenagers swerved too run it over and ended up taking out the stop sign at the corner when he couldn't get it back into the road fast enough. 

The permanent underclass blow by my building every day through two stop signs at damn near a hundo.

Once or twice they have the Nash Bridges in tow. I'd love to see what a speed bump would do. The neighbors don't want it because the goobermint apparently doesn't plow blocks with speed bumps. It snows maybe one out of every three years to need plowing.

You know, if you accelerate at the right moment you can lift the front of your vehicle for more suspension travel and hit the speed bump with little or no impact. Works all the time. 

I live in an apartment complex with a gate. You would think that the three speed bumps and massive gates at both entrances and exits would prevent people from speeding through at Mach 20. Nope.

I was walking my dog and looked both ways—TWICE—around the corner where the gate was. Next thing I know, a guy flies around the blind corner at the entrance, going maybe 40 mph and I had to throw myself back and yank my dog to avoid getting hit.

So now I'm on the ground, my dog is freaking out and I watch the guy slam on his brakes and sit there for a solid minute as the gate slowly opens, all while watching me struggle to get up and check on my dog. 

You can have every precaution under the sun, and some people just don't care. Always be vigilant.