Driving Me Crazy

You know, I don’t like jam on anything and yet every morning lately, I am being force fed jam.  It is the worst flavor of jam too – traffic jam.  I live about twelve miles from my job.  On a great day I can make it in twenty minutes (Prius, no pick up) and on an average day, thirty.  Not bad at all.  Lately, with the congestion and accidents and sheer volume of cars on the road, it is more like forty. I can handle that too.  It is the hour, or the hour and half that makes me crazy.    And I don’t want to complain because when it is backed up that badly it is usually that someone died and they are dead and I am just running late, which seems very small in comparison.

A city on a hill is going to have a lot of traffic.

I hate to tell you Austin, but I don’t think we are in Austin anymore.  Well, not the sleepy college town Austin, or the Keep Austin Weird Austin.  We are big city Austin now – kind of like Dallas of the Hill Country.  However our roads are still so very farm to market.  People keep pouring in, we are building like crazy to accommodate them and our tiny little roads are just bumper to bumper to bumper.  People in my Nextdoor Neighbor group post constantly complaining about terrible drivers in the neighborhood.  “Someone passed me on the left!”, “Someone passed me on the right!”, “So and so did not come to a full stop by the school!”  One man had the audacity to say that perhaps we should place speed bumps along the main route through the neighborhood.  I am not a huge speeder, but I tell you, the day they put those speed bumps in is the day I become an eco-terrorist and blow them up.  Why?  Because by the time I fight through all that traffic to get home, I just want to be home.  I think it is this mentality that has Austin driving so poorly; we are tired of sitting and just want to be where we are going.  Turning right out of our neighborhood between 4-6pm means you sit and inch forward because four million people are traveling down that road being stopped at all the lights at the same time.  My kids go to school off of a road with a lot of numbers and there is just one road to get in and the same road to get out.  What happens when there is an accident on that road? It takes an hour to get there, school is delayed, and chaos ensues.  Can’t get a secondary road built there because of the delicate environmental system surrounding it but we can get apartment complexes and housing developments built in the same delicate environment. Interesting, right?

Ugh, it is a conundrum.  I am not sure what the answer is or that it is even being sought in a timely fashion.  Trains aren’t going to help those of us who aren’t close to the city or close to the trains.  The flying car the Jetsons promised us is not here.  We are having big city problems on a small city infrastructure and I don’t know if they will be able to ever meet or keep up with the demands and improvements needed.

This almost depresses me except that there are some things we can do.  We can let people in instead of riding the bumper of the car ahead of us.  That would help because then those people desperate to be let in are in and will not gun it and try to make it in.    And it is okay if you let them in and they don’t wave to you.  It isn’t nice, but you know you are morally superior, rest in that knowledge instead of the wave.  We could maybe actually stop at red lights instead of thinking “I got this one!” or “that’s not red, it’s dark yellow”.  I am not going to suggest that we stop using the shoulder as a right hand turn lane because my God, the traffic would back up even more.  How about we only do it from about a hundred yards out instead of a mile out though?  And please, let’s not tear ass through the neighborhood and have people threaten speed bumps on us.  Biggest of all though, put your phones down.  It is hard, I know.  It makes you feel wiggly inside to not see what just beeped on your phone.  You can do it.  I know because I more than once drove across the country with NO cell phone.  Cross country, not across town.  Be strong, you can do it.

Folks, we are going to have to do these little things to make it better because the way things work, there will be more people and more cars here long before there are more roads, or better roads or a great solution.  Austin is wonderful but traffic in Austin stinks and it is a problem.  Guess what? If you drive a car here, you are part of the problem.  Drive nicely and maybe you could be part of the solution.