#oneaday Day 72: Jam on Toast

The tail-lights of the cars in front of you brighten as they apply the brakes. Your collective speed drops. There seem to be an awful lot more cars around than there were a moment ago, and a few trucks, too. Your heart sinks.

Yes, you’re entering a traffic jam.

At this point, you will do one (or more) of several things. You may suddenly wonder if you have enough music to cover the entire period this eventuality may cover. You may consider phoning someone at your destination to let them know you’re likely to be late. You may decide that no, this jam couldn’t possibly last for very long because it appeared out of nowhere, so there’s no need to phone ahead, because you left the house with plenty of time to spare just in case this happened. You may emit a string of incredibly loud and offensive swearwords—this is considerably more likely if you’re in the car by yourself and/or are an extrovert/sufferer of Tourette’s.

Then you see the electronic signs warning you of the “recommended” speeds (or, if you’re on the M25, the actual variable speed limit which you can be pulled over and/or caught on speed camera for.) You see it and you figure that hey, 40 mph may not be quick, but at least it’s moving, right?

Wrong. What they don’t tell you is that the “recommended” speeds are actually a cunningly disguised secret code. Fortunately, I have cracked it.

• 20mph – You ain’t going anywhere for at least an hour and probably more like three hours, plus.
• 40mph – You will move, but very slowly. You will be lucky to break 20mph.
• 60mph – You will move at a relatively comfortable speed but will be lucky to break 40mph and will often have to brake suddenly for no apparent reason.
• End of speed limit – Theoretically, you are allowed to drive at full speed now, but the volume of traffic coming out of the jam means that this will be very difficult to achieve for at least another half an hour.

People have developed various coping mechanisms in order to deal with the stress and frustration of traffic jams. You could shout and swear some more. You could turn your music up. If you’re a Mercedes driver, you could weave in and out of lanes in an attempt to get as far forward as possible. And if you’re an asshole, you could use the hard shoulder and/or filter lanes for junctions to “jump the queue” and get as far forward as possible by barging in. But if you do this, you deserve to be scooped up by a gigantic super-powerful electromagnet (which picks your car up, obviously, not you, unless you’re a robot) and fed to an ant-eater which has been inflated to unnatural proportions via the ethically questionable misuse of SCIENCE! and which has developed a taste for cars—so much so that the giant form of the ant-eater has in fact been re-dubbed the car-eater.

So yeah. Don’t do that. Sit and wait patiently. Because ultimately, no amount of screaming, shouting, swearing, lane-weaving or driving like a dick is going to affect the fact that there are hundreds of cars stuck in place, just like you. And until the day when all cars have a button that allows them to take off and fly away like the DeLorean in Back to the Future (when, if you think about it, we won’t really need roads at all any more) there’s nothing you can do about it.

So sit. Wait. Suffer with the rest of us.