Peering 'Round The Bend

One of the consequences of the increased media presence around Boston is that it has resulted in a lot of people driving in the city who have no idea how the street system around these parts work. They probably expect roads which are two way streets to stay that way and making four rights resulting in getting back to where you just were, which is very rarely the case in this town. Anyway, between the lost media and increased police presence on the highways forcing drivers to obey traffic laws like they haven't done in years, the roads around these parts have been even tougher than normal for the last couple of days. Yesterday I was trapped in one of the more annoying traffic jams of my life. For all of life's annoyances which I will deal with and move on from for some reason traffic jams get under my skin like nothing else. Maybe it is from all my years of doing traffic reports on the radio and feeling as though they are something which should only happen to other people, but being in a car going 10 miles an hour surrounded by 1,000 cars doing the same thing makes me simultaneously want to scream and move to Wyoming, where I assume they don't have this problem.

Yesterday it took me about an hour and half to take a 30 mile journey, with most of that time spent trying to cover the last 9 miles. In the wake of Monday's tragedy I kept reminding myself this was just something I would have to deal with and I would have been fine with it if the traffic had resulted from a legitimate reason, but when I finally got to the end of it there was nothing there - no accident, no line of slow drivers - it just suddenly ended. I have to say that just made the entire situation all the more frustrating because it is one thing to be extremely late for your appointment, it is entirely another when you don't have anything to blame it on. I don't know why this is true, but traffic jams are easier to suffer if you have a person to focus your anger on. There is something about seeing flashing lights off in the distance which takes the emphasis off the same set of taillights in front of you which you have been staring at for the last 30 minutes and causes you to instead bond with them, as if we are all victims of some kind of dastardly scheme, rather than what we really are - not smart enough to find an alternative route when we should have known the highways around here are constantly clogged and too stubborn to live anywhere else.

Traffic jams are all about assigning blame, which is why the worst thing which can happen when you are in one is to find yourself stuck behind an 18-wheeler that blocks your entire view. Not only are these things boring to look at, but they prevent you from seeing what the trouble is or how much longer you can expect to be in it. That inability to know what is coming down the road at me makes want to pull my hair out in clumps. (Although I will say that moment when the truck merges over and you find yourself staring down a blocked-off lane of the highway and three tow-trucks is a little like the moment in a murder mystery when they finally reveal the killer.) Thus, the only logical conclusion you can come up with in that situation is that this trucker is the cause for the entire hold-up and if you could just get around him all your problems would be solved. This warped logic is exactly why I make it a point to drift slightly to one side or another during slow-moving traffic - just in case the person in the low car behind me who can't see around my SUV I want them to have the chance to see what I have in front of my vehicle, which is just more cars. Basically, I'm trying to show them this is not my fault.

Obviously, I know traffic jams are never the result of just one car. Trust me, there is plenty of blame to go around. It takes a series of people to cause that much of a delay, from the person who actually has the accident which blocks the lane, to the first 20 cars who don't know how to merge over and the next 50 who wait until the last possible second to do so down to the slow driver who find themselves in the left lane even though they should never be there and the city planner who thought this stretch of highway only needed to be three lanes wide. My point is simply that while I am never going to wish harm on another driver, people are more understanding of accidents versus seemingly random inconveniences which have no clear beginning or end. Humans have a basic need to know there was a reason something happened (hmmm, seems to be strangely appropriate theme for this week). Hopefully things will go back to normal in a few days and traffic will revert back to just being bad, instead of its current level of God-awful. Of course, that recovery would be a little speedier if the out-of-town press would just agree to stick to the back roads. Given their reporting skills over the last week maybe not being the first on scene would be the best thing for everyone involved.