I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up I was having an understanding of perspective constantly reinforced by my parents. I had to finish everything on my dinner plate because there were children in the world starving; receiving hand-me-down clothes from my older brothers was better than what some kids had, and so on. While I can retrospectively thank my parents for teaching me the often humbling art of applying perspective in certain situations, there are times when it doesn’t mean squat.
You may have read this article on the PopSci front page that tells the very scary story of an ongoing nine-day traffic jam in China that stretches for around 100 kilometres. Now while that certainly sucks for China—and I’m sure I’m not alone when I say that I wouldn’t want to be stuck in that—the perspective of the situation doesn’t change my loathing of Sydney traffic.
While I can readily admit that I can contextually acknowledge that Sydney traffic is nowhere near as bad as China’s current predicament, I still can’t cut traffic any mental slack. Interstate visitors think I’m joking when I explain that Sydney peak-hour traffic is actually peak-three-hour traffic… they tend to stop laughing shortly after when they realise I’m not kidding.
I would encourage you to partake of a little game next time you’re on the roads that I often play. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs, but it does inject some logic into why Sydney’s roads are often overflowing with cars. Count how many people are in the cars that you drive past. For me, it’s usually only the driver, which I’m likewise guilty of a lot of the time, but it all starts to make a whole lot more sense.
But although carpooling is a fantastic theoretical solution, Sydneysiders are so spread out in their various homes, and can travel great distances to get to work, that it’s more common that workmates live impractical distances from one another. Couple this with the fact that guestimating a morning commute to work in peak-two-hour traffic is often notoriously difficult at the best of times, and throwing in pit stops to collect co-workers makes getting everyone to work on time a whole lot trickier.
Trains are still the best peak-hour workaround in my opinion (even though they tend to be packed), but they’re not exactly sharing the roads. Even with the inclusion of more bus lanes, buses can still easily get caught up in crawling Sydney traffic. As private contractors scramble to create new toll-heavy roads, more and more people seem to be driving, which means that new roads may help to ease congestion somewhat, but they don’t really seem to be solving the traffic problem.
I think it’s time for some new paradigm-breaking ideas. Do you have any?
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