I was very moved to contemplate the San Francisco Peninsula in the earliest days of European occupation and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.

Update: You can join Chris Carlsson on a bicycle tour of San Francisco on April 24, from Noon to 4 pm.

Discover lost freeways, ghosts of train routes, and a vivid account of how San Franciscans moved around this peninsula through time. Hear about the violent strikes that shaped public transit, the graft and corruption that conquered the Outside Lands. It’s a social, historical and critical 4-hour tour through the city’s transportation past and present.

Details here.

When it came time to pay the ticket, I elected to pay an additional $32 to the City and County of San Francisco and $20 to online provider of traffic school in this jurisdiction. This allows take a course and a test. Once I pass the test, I can have the infraction removed from my driving record, protecting my insurance rates, and presumably rendering me a better, safer driver.

I went through the course materials and took the chapter tests. The content was reasonably well presented, although the web site was annoyingly slow and there were a number of infelicitous UI decisions (arrows that seemed to imply links, but didn’t, no url or other identifying information in the e-mail that they sent me to confirm my registration, etc.)

Some of the material that was presented in the course and the chapter quizzes didn’t seem like it was particularly important to the goal of improving my driving skills and making me a safer, more responsible driver. Material on what constituted valid forms of identification at the DMV is useful, but it isn’t going to keep me from pulling out into traffic when I don’t have the right of way.

Little did I know. After I completed the course, I was directed to take a final exam that was administered by NTSA, the National Traffic Safety Administration, which is not the NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA is a branch of the Federal government. NTSA is not:

NTSA provides home study traffic school course review and evaluation to insure compliance with all Court requirements and standards. All home study traffic school course reviews conducted by NTSA for court approval, are conducted by Mr. Ernie Garcia, a retired Highway Patrol Lieutenant with 30 years of experience.

In theory, NTSA is an independent agent that can ensure that the student has taken the course and has learned the material. Each independent provider of traffic school sends their students on to NTSA for final testing.

This final exam is crazy. I thought that my browser had been hijacked, or that I was the subject of a prank. Some of the questions were ridiculous beyond belief.

Examples:

In case you aren’t following me, these three questions pertain not to the Motor Vehicle Code or rules for defensive driving, but to the very specific version of the course materials that I studied. The first refers to a specific illustration in the course materials, the second and third to how the material was presented.

It gets worse.

This test question is asking me about the background color of a particular item?! Unbelievable.

Worse, there is no right answer listed. The background is neither yellow, purple, orange, red, nor blue. It is white, I checked the html.

The background color for that particular paragraph is the same as the preceding one, only the font color is changed to red. Red is not the correct answer.

There are 40 questions on each test. The student must get 20 out of 24 on the questions that pertain to DMV materials and 13 out of the 16 questions that “NTSA develops with each traffic school, security, or course specific questions that relate to specific events in their course that have nothing to do with the required curriculum information of the course.”

Is anyone well served by these questions? The point is to ensure that the person taking the exam is the same as the person who took the course. Or, or from the exam web site, “To reasonably insure that the person taking the traffic school course is the one taking the final examination.” I don’t suppose that you could accurately answer these questions unless you had looked at the course, but I read through the course and I couldn’t remember how many rows of signs there were in a particular illustration or what the first illustration in Chapter 3 was. I have a reasonably good memory for this sort of material, but come on.

Couldn’t the independent traffic schools content be differentiated by content instead of layout? The course materials had various random content, jokes, even a couple of lines about how the school website was created with Dreamweaver. Do they really have to test on formatting?

I was expecting the blood and gore movies of my high school driver’s education classes. This is scarier.

It just reinforces my previous beliefs that traffic school is a scam.

Drive safely.

Down there on the lower left, near the end of my blogroll is a search at blogdigger.com for all the blogs near to my zip code. This is basically the Haight and Western Addition of San Francisco, although it appears that the definition of “near” is pretty broad.

Unfortunately, the Geo-tags website seems to be down continuously. The home page gives a nicely framed, “The system is too busy to complete this request at this time.”

For the purpose of this blog, this isn’t a very useful technology. I have a static location, and while it may be useful for you sometimes, and meaningful for me. to know that I live in the Haight district of San Francisco, it doesn’t make too much difference. Are you going to read what I say because of where I live? Probably not, unless you are my neighbor, or I write on subjects of neighborhood interest.

Where I can see this being handy is for travelling blogs. If I’m cycling across the country with only the clothes on my back and my trusty wirelessly enabled laptop, killing my own food and posting every day for the good folks at home, it would be pretty interesting to have those post be automatically sucked up and plotted on Google maps.

This particular use case isn’t that easy to do with what I know of Movable Type. The geo-tags need to go into the head of the html document, and the vanilla configuration of Movable Type puts the head element into the template files, which are the same for all entries.

From Freeway 101 Traveling South or 19th Avenue/Highway One Traveling North: Follow signs for 101 South/Lombard Street. Follow Lombard Street to Van Ness Avenue and turn left. Follow Van Ness north until you reach Bay Street and turn left. See “Directions Continued” listed below.

From Freeway 80 Traveling West: Follow signs for Freeway 101 North/Golden Gate Bridge. You will exit onto Van Ness Avenue. Follow Van Ness Avenue several miles north until you reach Bay Street and turn left. See “Directions Continued” listed below.

Directions Continued: Follow Bay Street to Laguna. Turn right on Laguna and follow the road as it curves past the Marina Safeway shopping center and turns into Marina Drive. Follow Marina Drive, approximately two miles to the Marina Gate entrance into the Presidio. Crissy Field will be on the right hand side of the road.

These are the worst directions since the Donner Party.

The directions from 80 aren’t so bad, but the Northbound/Southbound directions are terrible. When you start to “follow signs for 101 South/Lombard Street,” you are within 500 yards and 2 turns of the destination. Instead these directions take you about 6 miles out and back for no obvious purpose.

I can’t really fathom how they got it so wrong. Computer generated directions? Cooked up in Washington, D. C.? Compiled by a summer intern?

To make matters worse, there is no contact information on the page for feed back and corrections.