This morning I left for school at 7:23am I know this for a fact because that is the time my cellphone read when I started my car. In Canada in December it snows, this week it happened to snow LOTS. Almost 10cm in under 24 hours. Naturally, this lead to some of the worst traffic jams of the year. So as per my usual routine I took out my blackberry to surf the internet while the car gleefully whirred away thankful for a chance to get warm, charge its battery and lubricate its various parts. By 7:31am I was "on the road" that is to say, slowly backing out of my parking spot. At 9:07am I was at my estimation, 50% completed my journey to school. The freeway all 4 lanes heading northbound was in fact, a parking lot. I'm a patient person and for all intents and purposes (ignoring the title of this blog) a very calm and level headed type of person, you know, the kind of guy that uses logical thought to work through arguments and the like. But even at 9:24am I still wasn't at school. That's a bit excessive don't you think? Considering on a summer day the drive would take me the shorter end of 20 minutes. By the time 9:32am rolled around I was pretty much getting used to the fact that a major bout of Road Rage was about to spill forth that would make even Gordon Ramsey from Kitchen Nightmares blush. At 9:40 I pulled into the school parking lot with a great sigh of relief. Crisis averted I managed to not kill anyone in a blind rage on the way to school. Its been a good day.
Seriously tho, wanna solve most your city's traffic jam problems without spending a a dime? Simple solution.
BIG GAPS
Yeah for real! BIG GAPS, it will work. Think about it for a second, if everyone on the road gave a 40 or 50 foot gap between them and the car in front of them, people would be free to change lanes, merge and exit in a safe and easy manner. 90% of the problems that cause traffic jams can be eliminated in this manner. I've been driving now for almost 10 years and even back when I was 15 I could see that the most congested places on a major road were on and off ramps. Why? Because there were always droves of people waiting to get on or off. However most driving styles you see are all about "getting there first" meaning people ignore signal lights of other motorists, follow to close and generally act like they are the only car on the road. This in turns makes other drivers slow to a crawl to wait for a chance to sneak in, which now creates more problems because the road with a speed limit of 100 just got slowed down to 25 while the motorist that had to crawl tries to gain his/her speed back and resume normal flow, of course this has consequences in the form of a chain reaction that slows down 50 other motorists behind the original person trying to crawl their way onto a fast moving freeway.
This of course is not a end all solution but it would greatly help speed up roads during peak periods. Just a thought, maybe we should all try it out!
-Sencha
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