Well, she asked the question:

To a query from Wesley Chapel’s Debbie New whether Tampa Bay drivers might consider adopting the European convention of “zippering” at highway entrance ramps—in which merging drivers accelerate to match their speed with the traffic already on the highway to meld onto it seamlessly, like a zipper—caller Bob McCarty of Tampa suggests:

“No, I don’t think it will catch on here… at least not until that other European tradition catches on:

“Drive right, pass left.”

And I also asked a question:

Jim Fleck of Tampa answered:

“You wanted to know how we pass the time commuting? You’re insane if you pass the time doing anything but DRIVING. Driving is a full-time job. Anything that draws attention from keeping from getting yourself killed out there is a bad idea.

“You can’t shave, eat, talk on a cell phone… without losing some degree of attention. I see people with a map spread across their steering wheel, women applying makeup ...

“I’ve been here since 1945, and I’m too old for the traffic here now. I have a Gull Wing trike. We’ve been talking about moving to Crystal River. We have a wooded acre there off U.S. 19.

“… there are just too many bad wrecks on the roads here, and there’ll be another one if I hang around here too much longer.”

And Adam Yalowich had a couple:

Even though he waited an hour after his usual departure time for work, he got caught up in March 8’s universal gridlock trying to get downtown. When he read that a city official had described the staging of the sold-out Get Motivated! seminar during rush hour as a “perfect storm,’’ he was flabbergasted.

“This seminar happens at the same time of day every year. There’s the same big ad in the paper. And on that morning, I saw one policeman.

“That Saturday at a walkathon (on Bayshore Boulevard) I saw ten officers in front of Davis Islands.... I saw eight officers at that Naked Bike ride, and they only had a dozen (not quite naked) riders.

“The city has to know that if they set something for rush hour, this is the problem they’re going to have. And they have to know which are the tough intersections coming in… I tried 10 different ways in. On Morgan Street, the lights lasted 15 second each time. Almost nobody got through.

“They can’t be doing this. They can’t be inconveniencing that many people. And now they’re encouraging all these people to move into condos? They want new office buildings downtown?

“They need to get it together.’’