Pink Ticket Fixer

This gaudy building on the corner of Flamingo and Rainbow is a traffic lawyer's office. The fact that it is on Flamingo and Rainbow makes the bright pink building quite appropriate. Even though pink isn't typically thought of as part of a rainbow's spectrum of colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), the reference to pink flamingos is completely fitting. (You might also notice from the palm trees that it was very windy this day).

I imagine traffic lawyers do very well in Las Vegas. There are accidents all the time in this town. This is a party town after all and people get stupid. And if you're a pedestrian or a pedestrian on a bike, be extra careful walking or riding the streets of Las Vegas. I think some drivers actually aim for these slow-moving targets. Yes, Vegas has an extremely high rate of pedestrians getting run over by cars and trucks. And god forbid you walk in a crosswalk--you might as well put a sign on your back, "Hit Me." One time I was walking across Maryland Parkway in a very brightly flashing pedestrian cross-walk and pick-up truck failed to yield and passed right in front of me as I negotiated the middle of its 7-lanes. Swearing as he passed by, the driver flipped me off. It was hair-raisingly laughable. Be careful out there friends.

It's been almost a year since I last posted on this blog, but now I pick up the banner again to report on the various ins and outs of driving in Las Vegas. I'm doing this primarily because I'm currently teaching a course at UNLV about social media and the need to do what I preach seems relevant.

Secondarily, the topic of driving, roadways, and transportation issues in general are of some scholarly interest to me, a media studies professor. Media studies?! Transportation?! What's the link, you, good reader, may be asking yourself (if indeed any readers at all are seeing this--which so far looks doubtful)? Well, historically, in the area of social research, transportation and communication were part of similar research area. Malcom Wiley and Stuart A. Rice's (1933) classic volume, "Communication Agencies and Social Life" is an example in which one can see academic critique of newspapers and transportation discussed as related communicative agencies. Not until later that century did transportation split off from its study as a communicative form to become a civil engineering sub-discipline. Through this blog, I, in my minute way, bring these two entities back together. I believe my former mentor, John Durham Peters, would take some delight in this move.