Traffic

I have experienced traffic in many cities. At least in Vancouver there is an excuse for it - there are buses but no trains to speak of and I can't see many ways of improving the public transport system since there is so much water. Too many bridges to cross.

From the top of the Fernsehturm in Berlin, you have a 360° view of the whole city and the traffic just seems to flow. German efficiency. We were out and about in the bus at all times of day and it did seem that whilst the traffic may be slow sometimes, I never saw it stop.

No-one in their right mind would drive in London, and yet I have done it once or twice. Using the underground is an efficient way of getting around the city, but it doesn't give a real sense of where you are. It's as though the network itself were what is, but above are roads that link and take you where you don't necessarily want to go and drive you insane. But everyone needs to do it once, just for the crack.

My own personal European traffic nightmare, and one I became embroiled in twice, thus proving my learning curve is a bit wonky, was the Antwerp ringroad. There is nothing like sitting for three hours in the searing sun just outside of Antwerp. No-one should do that, not even for the crack.

Portsmouth frequently grinds to a halt. On my bike I could get to work more quickly than many of my colleagues in cars, but last year there was an accident on one of the motorway sliproads and the city became one choking mass of vehicles going absolutely nowhere, well, except for the cyclists and pedestrians, and in fairness, you can walk the city end to end in an hour. In Pompey there is no excuse.

Then there's this roundabout just outside of Cork airport. Your first experience of Irish driving when you get your hire car is an unbelievable mess of cars and road signs and nothing moving and it takes longer to untangle yourself from that knot than the whole of the rest of the journey.

And then yesterday, there I was in Vancouver traffic, trying to get back during what turns out to be rush hour, though for the life of me I can't figure out where people are rushing to at 15.00. And I knew that this wasn't the worst of it, the traffic was moving, albeit slowly. Cycling, I have looked down from the bridge and witnessed complete gridlock, almost Antwerpian. Horror stories of people taking three hours to get home. But of course I was stressed by the petrol gauge needle hovering just above empty. Kevin's voice in my head saying,
'We can get to Surrey and back when it's on empty,' but then a sign warning of how much fuel you use when the engine is idling.
On the radio, Jack FM, two people discussing the hockey. A woman's voice says how someone had declared that every Canadian should cheer for the Oilers, the only Canadian team left in the Stanley cup. A man's voice counters that he would rather suffer a painful death than cheer for the Oilers,
'It's not like every American team isn't filled with 12 guys from Dog River, Saskatchewan anyway.'
'Dog River?' I think, recognising the name in spite of my traffic and heat induced torpor, 'oh yes, Corner Gas, didn't they have difficulty putting their own team together, didn't they have to even include Lacey whom everyone hates, or was that Curling?' Mad dogs and Englishmen and women sit in metal boxes in the mid afternoon sun.
The man's voice has a bitter tone,
'At the Oilers' game, they announced, "on this day in hockey history, May the 12th 2006, Todd Bertuzzi was out fishing,",' Burned. Todd Bertuzzi is a hero of the Vancouver Canucks and the Canucks are out of the competition.

I got home, I didn't stall or run out of petrol. I saw no road rage, just one or two standard acts of abject stupidity. I wonder how the Iranian traffic-meister could sort it out for us.