Dave Brown

Traffic report

Driving to work today, heading into the Yamate Tunnel, I noticed that the pixel boards were warning me of a broken-down car inside the tunnel. Specifically, they said “WARNING: BREAKDOWN 5km AHEAD”, and the number kept decrememnting as I passed them.

Naturally I was driving carefully so as to avoid having BREAKDOWN turn into ACCIDENT, and keeping my eyes wide open for signs of the breakdown.

Turns out it was a guy in a little white van who’d gotten a flat, and was in the breakdown lane. The van wasn’t even the width of the breakdown lane at that point, so he wasn’t really holding up traffic any.

What was holding up traffic, though, was the line of flares 200m away, the police van with a big LED signboard on it saying PLEASE USE THE RIGHT-HAND LANE, THIS LANE IS CLOSED, the two police cars and the police motorbike, all dispatched to keep the guy installing the spare wheel from getting run over by passing motorists. They closed the whole lane almost entirely un-necessarily.

On the way home, I was pleased to note that the usual traffic jam that happens at the bottleneck on the way out of the Yamate tunnel was apparently not as bad as usual. However, in between me entering the expressway and me getting up to the end of the Yamate tunnel, an impatient driver in a BMW rear-ended a not-impatient-enough driver in a van. Cue the motorcycles, vans, flares, signs, and whatnot else.

Once I’d gotten past the crash, mind, it was smooth sailing the rest of the way home.