On a highway leading to Beijing: <a class="postlink" href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100824/ap_on_re_as/as_china_traffic_jam" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100824/ap_ ... raffic_jam</a> Quote from the news article: "The state-run newspaper said the jam between Beijing and Jining city had given birth to a mini-economy with local merchants capitalising on the stranded drivers' predicament by selling them water and food at inflated prices." Focus: What was the worst traffic jam you have been stuck in? How did you pass the time? I am not sure how long the average person was stuck in this particular jam, but I am assuming many were stuck for at least a night, maybe even a few. How do you keep yourself from not going crazy during this time?? By the way, I'll be sticking to the Trains to get to Beijing.
Re: Epic traffic jam, what the hell is there to do? Don't get distracted and BUMP the car in front of you. A couple people submitted this. I have been in some nasty ones. I just try to relax, pray I have some entertaining audiobooks or podcasts on my iPod, and tough it out. How do y'all deal with traffic jams?
I lived in Atlanta. More specifically, I lived just south of 'Spaghetti Junction' which was not awesome despite the delicious sounding name. It would take me ten minutes to get to work during non-rush hour hours (7-9:15 and 3:30-7), but about an hour or more during rush hour. If there was an accident tack on another hour. My final solution to not ram my way through and end my day in a standoff with police? Windows down, Jerry Reed's 'Eastbound and Down' blasting, and some karaoke scream therapy.
I thought this thread was going to be about Guy Fawkes' massive car collection at first... Focus: The worst ones, IMO, are the ones that happen when you need to get somewhere and are seemingly caused by nothing. You start slowing down and eventually come to a standstill. If you look out ahead of you, you can see the cars lined up but nothing appears to be blocking the way (no fires, smoke, cop/firefighter/ambulance lights). Suddenly, everyone starts moving. As you pick up speed you look to see if there was an accident or something, but you don't see anything. Also, when I lived in Philadelphia, I swear the fucking sun would cause traffic jams. Christ people, the sun comes out every day. Get some shades and/or put the visor down and keep moving.
Driving back to St. Pete, FL from Richmond, VA in my girlfriend's minivan with her, me and four boys ranging in age from 9 months to 12 years. Driving home to St. Pete at night, in August without air conditioning no less, we got a flat tire at like Midnight somewhere in GA maybe. No jack. Shit! We called AAA but were told that because of where we were and what time it was, it could take up to 2 hours to get someone out to us. At midnight. In the middle of nowhere with four restless, obnoxious boys in the sticky humidity. Beautiful. Two hours later, tow truck arrives, helps us put on the spare and we limp up the road to find a motel. No such luck. All of them are full. We find a nearby Walmart and sleep fitfully in the parking lot with the infant (mine) feeling especially restless and wanting nothing more than to be out of that seat. Get into the auto center first thing in the morning and get on the road back home at about 10am. We still have like 5 hours left on the trip but we were moving finally. Yay! Or not. Stand still on I-95about 5 miles from the Walmart exit. 2 1/2 hours in the searing heat with those same 4 boys fighting over 2 video games and 2 Cokes between the lot of us. But hey, I can say that I stood in the middle of I-95 and smoked a cigarette (or ten).
Then suddenlty, you start slowing down and eventually come to a standstill. Then, suddently everyone starts moving. As you pick up speed you look to see if there was an accident or something, but you don't see anything. And again and again. For no reason whatsoever. What the hell is with this? It makes no sense to me. Anyone here work for the DOT that can explain accordion traffic to me?
My dad works in the corporate office of an auto parts manufacturer Southfield, MI (just outside of Detroit). After I graduated college, I had about 6 months to spare before I started my first job in Chicago. I didn't have any money, so I couldn't take off and travel, so I got a part time job in the credit department at the same company my dad worked at. It was pretty nice, because we drove to/from work together everyday. This was over a decade ago when the auto industry was still doing fairly well, so all of the manufacturing plants in and around Detroit were booming. In addition to the normal 8:00-10:00am and 5:00-7:00pm rush hours, you also had the blue-collared factory rush hours. Because the plants run 24/7, you had three additional rush hours from 5:00-7:00am, 3:00-5:00pm, and another one in the middle of the night. What this basically meant is that it was rush hour all-day, every day. I can't say that I ever had an experience where I was in the car for like 3 hours, but it seemed like anytime you had to go somewhere on the highway, you were constantly sitting in rush-hour traffic. Ever since, I have vowed NEVER to live further than 10 miles from my office/dowtown, even if that means you have to spend 30%-40% more on your home to live in a good location. I will NEVER live in a suburb. Mark my word.
I've been in a few bad traffic jams between Cincinnati and Cleveland while in college. Nothing too crazy, just a couple hour delay. While living in the DC area, there were a few that were bad en route to Cleveland on the PA turnpike. Plus there's nowhere to go once you're on it since the exits are so far apart. The worst jam I've ever been in was actually just a commute home from work while living in Columbia, MD. I was working in northern Virginia that day. I hit a bad jam on 66 towards the beltway. I hit a bad jam on the beltway north. On days like this I wouldn't take 95 north or 29, I'd get off on side roads in Bethesda area and weave and zig zag back roads until I got back up to Columbia. Well, that day there was a suicide attempt off a bridge on the Balt/Wash parkway, a huge hole in the road blocking 29N and a bad wreck on both 95 N and New Hampshire Ave. It was every possible worst case scenario on every single road that I could really use to go home. It was comical at this point. I swear every road heading north out of DC was grid locked. Even little side streets. That drive during a normal rush would take anywhere from 1 to 1 1/2 hours. I only had to do it once every week or two so that was alright. Books on tape and music and I'm usually fine. This was too much. This ride took 5 1/2 hours to get home. Thankfully I had just put a full tank of gas in right as I was leaving to go home. That's just way too long to sit in a car just trying to get home on a normal weekday.
My worst experience was when my GF moved to Boston. We had a limited amount of time with the moving van and we were at one fucking light for over an hour... ONE FUCKING LIGHT. It was then that I knew the city wasn't for me. Unfortunately it took me a little over 3 years to get out.
Ah, you're talking about the Conshohocken Bend. On one of the major arteries into Philly from the west, the road is relatively shaded from the sun. But when you come around the Conshohocken Bend suddenly you're getting a face full of morning sun that isn't even high enough to be blocked by visors. That magnificent road is 202 / Schuylkill Expressway. This road is probably the cause of half the suicides / murder-suicides in Philadelphia. The worst though, is coming back west on route 202. In a relatively short 1 mile period, it goes from 5 lanes, to 2, back up to 4 lanes, down to 2 lanes. This one mile was the source of all my frustrations and anger for a 4 month period. If it wasn't for evening sails and a healthy disrespect for my liver, I wouldn't have survived.
My worst experience with traffic was on the New York Thruway on the way up to Vermont with my family. There was some awful accident a few miles ahead of us that wound up shutting down the entire highway. Even if we'd been able to get to it, there wasn't anywhere to turn around, so our only option was to wait. And wait. For six hours. And I had to pee. With a choice between pissing in a bottle in close quarters with my family or hopping out and pissing over the guardrail in full view of 100 people, I chose the latter. Unfortunately, 14-year-old me didn't see the humor in being cheered on by a chorus of horns while taking a leak, so in all it was horribly embarassing. I should've taken up smoking.
I too am a guardrail hopper. We were coming back from rafting and traffic was at what seemed to be a stand still. I had to go. There was no option except jumping out of the truck, hurdling the rail and squatting...being without a wang and all. You think traffic doesn't move at all? Not the case. I had to run to catch up to the truck again. It just appears to not move when you're in the rig. When you're not, trust me that shit moves. Sadly, the jam was caused by a fatal accident miles ahead. Kinda puts sitting in traffic into perspective. Sidenote: Why, when I ran this through spellcheck, did it want me to capitalize wang? This will bug me until I find out. EDIT: In answer to my question I got the expected and then this: I still don't get why spellcheck would know or catch that but...okey then. I think I believe Jets below more though.
Probably thought you meant the Asian last name. I know what you mean as far as traffic moving, but in six hours we didn't move more than twenty yards. All three lanes shut down. Nobody was getting past that. It does puts things in perspective though. I looked it up when we got back and it turns out there were at least two fatalities.
I categorize traffic jams by two things. Those caused by nature, and those caused by over population. The worse population related jam I've ever been in was in Chicago. I made the fatal mistake of landing at O'Hare and trying to drive through the city to head north. My plane also landed at 8AM. This was during the automated toll construction and a bunch of other shit and I averaged 4mph for 4.5 hours. I know people in LA sit through worse daily but at least they're prepared for it. I wasn't. I had meetings to get to, had to piss, etc, etc. I had a nervous breakdown and yelling "fucking cunt" at least a thousand times. A few years ago I was coming back from a ski trip in VT. The temps had dropped and the highway was coated in black ice. Cars piled up, went off the road, State Troopers shut down the highway until the salt and sand trucks could come through and the fucked up cars were rescued. This shit lasted almost five hours but at least we had a cooler full of leftover beers and snacks. Everyone having phones with interwebs made things a little easier too.
You're leaving out those that are caused by an over abundance of stupid located in a specific area. Sometimes all that's required for those situations are a few drivers in one spot with (maybe) the combined mental prowess of a monkey on shrooms.
Vancouver has some of the worst flows into and out of any city, and they've been under construction lately. This has pretty well killed the any flow we may have had. Needless to say, my commutes have gone from an expected 45 minutes each way to an hour and a bit. Sometimes 2 hours. I can usually plan for those delays by offsetting my "go-to-work" time a little earlier or later than the rush. But FUCK YOU to all the asswipes that slow down to see what accident has happened in the opposite direction, causing huge backups. Forget it, and focus on putting your foot down on the go-fast pedal.
My favorite driving adventures were caused by living in a state where the city planners thought it would be a great idea to reduce six lanes of traffic down to three, and then run it through downtown, midtown, the University of Hawaii and end it at a mall. Or if you were going from east to west, it was all that in reverse, splitting the freeway so one way went to the airport, and the other way went to central Oahu. And then it met in one gigantic clusterfuck in the middle of the island. Oh, and most of the drivers were Asian. Why nobody ever took a step back and said, "This looks like a recipe for failure," I'll never know.
That is a pretty fatal mistake, considering O'Hare is NW of the city... That being said, fuck I90, 290, 94, 294, 88, and the rest of these fucking highways around Chicago, and most of Chicago drivers. I will also second the big FUCK YOU to rubberneckers. I've driven from my parents house, about 25 miles northwest of Chicago, in as little as 30 minutes and as long as 3 hours on the same fucking route. I resort to smoking every 30 minutes while blaring music. If I am alone, I will yell at other drivers and sometimes swing my hands outwards, open my mouth, and shake my head side to side. Also, I utilize the thumbs-down maneuver out of the window to show my non-approval of their driving. For example, when I drove from the burbs back into the city last week, I was driving behind this old fuckstick with WI plates who would slam his brakes any time the car 20 yards in front of him so much as hinted at slowing down. I mean, going from 60 (slow as shit as it is) to 45 in a matter of seconds, way above and beyond the three second rule. The first three or four times he did this, I cursed his soul from the privacy of my car. On the next time, I just passed and gave him the old thumbs down. I feel disapproval hurts more than the middle finger. edit: I've heard on numerous occasions that I am one of the safest/best drivers they have driven with, but my easily sparked road-screaming has left many a person uncomfortable and doubting my sanity.