My dad used to go to sports car rallies. The purpose of the rally was to drive a course and stay on time. You would get directions like
Follow highway 52.
Maintain 30 miles per hour average speed.
Turn right on Catfish Road.
Follow Catfish Road until Metze grocery.
Change average speed to 25 miles per hour.
You would follow these directions and there would be checkpoints to compute your average speed and make sure you were on course and on time.
My dad would always quiz me about rally speeds and such. He was big on asking how you did time and distance formulas.
Rate x Time = Distance.
Drive 60 mph for 58 minutes and you travel 58 miles. He was always quizzing my brother and me to make us try to figure out the problem. He used to give us a special project to figure out. If you drive your car 30 mph over a one-mile course, how fast would you have to drive back to average 60 mph? Well that was a trick question, and my brother and I struggled but never got the answer until he told us.
That was all well and good back during the 1960s when the roads weren’t clogged with traffic.
Now, the rallies would be harder to put on because of traffic. Back then, the rallies traveled around rural Charleston County and it was nothing to keep up average speeds of 45 mph. It would be almost impossible today to go that fast.
Now there are too many traffic lights, and even with all the four-lane highways there is still the problem of too many cars.
I just made a trip back from the beach to Greeleyville. It is only 72 miles from the beach to may house. It still took me two hours and four minutes to negotiate all the traffic. All the cars were trying to leave the beach and cars backed up at each traffic light.
Each light stopped a line of cars. The first light backed up cars for half a mile. It took 10 minutes of inching along to get a mile-and-a-half. At exactly an hour of traveling, I stopped for gas. I had been 34 miles. That was making pretty good time. The last 10 miles had been at 60 mph.
My mind was right for the trip, and I wasn’t upset about the slow traveling. It seemed like everyone else was upset though. They were either screaming on their phones or just screaming at themselves. Maybe they had an important appointment. It was probably that they had spent all their money and were coming home from vacation broke. Monday morning they have to go back to work.
I did get home in another hour. It wasn’t too bad of a trip. You just have to remember that it takes longer to travel now.
Well, back to the trick question. If you guessed that you have to drive back on the one-mile course at 90 mph, you are wrong.
To average 60 mph over the two miles, you have two minutes to complete the course. When you went down the course the first run you used up two minutes. All the time was used up.
It is impossible to have and average speed of 60 mph. That’s just a trick question. The real reason it takes so long to travel now is there are just too many cars.
