13
votes
A trio broke the Cannonball Run record by almost an hour, completing it in 26:38
Link information
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- Title
- Whoosh! That Car That Just Soared by Might Be Heading for the Coast
- Published
- Apr 11 2020
- Word count
- 1712 words
Somewhat ironically, I have been enjoying the ability to use cruise control on the highways at the speed limit. Not having traffic means not being forced to drive too fast or too slow. And a steady speed is great for efficiency.
An article about how the cannonball record that was set in November has apparently been beaten by almost an hour thanks to reduced traffic. I don't like the title of the article but I think convention here is to use the article's title as the post title?
The article also notes that the rate of speeding tickets has gone up among those cars still on the road.
That's actually easily explained without invoking recklessness. Speeding is a lot easier to do if you have no traffic as reference. Add (my [mis]conception of) the average american road; Wide and straight, and you really need something to keep your speed in check. Modern cars also make it harder to intuitively judge speed. (High seating position and dampened noise) So a driver who is relying to some extent on intuition (i.e. basically everyone) might find themselves with more tickets in these times.
I catch myself drifting above the limit waaay too often when I'm on an open road, so I can definitely see how it happens. Just a little too much pressure on the accelerator and you look down and you're doing 70-75 instead of 60-65.
It depends on the situation, but if you feel the original article headline is too vague, editorialized, or clickbaity, the general recommendation is to try to use your best judgement to improve it for the topic title. And in such cases I typically resort to using article
subheadingsledes instead, which are often far better than the headlines... but if even thesubheadinglede is not great, I will just create a title that is as objective and informative as I can make it.I would have preferred to title it "A trio broke the Cannonball Run record by almost an hour, completing it in 26:38" or something along those lines. Does that fit in the conventions?
Yeah, that would have been perfectly fine IMO, especially if that's what you wanted the topic to focus on rather than just the traffic related stuff (which doesn't really fit ~hobbies all that well). I have changed it to that now.
cc: @Algernon_Asimov
I've changed it for you. Mostly I didn't like "soared", because I thought this was an article about flying cars, which are in development.
It's also vague.
As @cfabbro has indicated (and as I often do), I've used the lede (what he refers to as the "subheading"). The lede is usually better than the headline. The headline is for attracting attention in this clickbait world we live in, but the lede is more informative.
TIL it's called a lede. :P
I wonder if they're gonna have to create a category of coronavirus cannonball records versus non-coronavirus records. Kinda tough to say it's legitimate to take advantage of an unprecedented event opening up the freeways (leaving aside the ethical question of whether the entire cannonball idea is legitimate).
I'm OK with that.