Day 220 - Traffic Story

Traffic Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Phantom traffic was the worst. Patrick hated sitting in stopped traffic, just waiting and wondering. Los Angeles had some of the worst phantom traffic jams. It was a problem everywhere there was overpopulation, but Los Angeles was the worst. Too many cars in too small a space. If traffic continued unimpeded it wasn’t a problem. But all it took was one set of brakes or one traveler traveling too close and the phantom jams compounded.

Mathematicians could determine how many cars a road should hold. They could tell what speeds they needed to travel. And when a problem occurred, they could tell just how long the effects would be felt.

Patrick sat in stopped traffic all the time. He remembered when the 105 addition was new and there was no traffic. He could remember speeding along, not a care in the world. There was a brief and glorious moment when there was no traffic and the traveler was free to travel as they wanted. But like all things, a vacuum is soon filled. People learned and travel routes filled in. The 105 became a part-time parking lot like so many other Los Angeles freeways.

There were lots of reasons for the phantom jams. Sometimes there was an accident or a police emergency. Sometimes people drove too close and all it took was one fender-bender. Sometimes it was construction or new traffic merging in from a busy road or adjoining freeway. And sometimes it was seemingly nothing.

There were plenty of starts and stops. All the time. It was annoying. One problem would get fixed or traffic would pass it and people would begin to speed away. But then there was always another stop just waiting to happen, the next time another traffic lane disappeared or another freeway merged. People would speed, then stop, then speed again and then stop. It was a vicious cycle. People in LA seemed to love to speed up to a stop. Any space at all on the road and they attacked. It was like an uncontrollable compulsion. They jumped at the opening, even if they could see that thirty seconds later it would be bumper to bumper again. Once people were driving like that, it was far too easy for anything to go wrong.

 What Patrick hated the most was the never knowing—never knowing who or what caused the congestion. There he would be, stuck, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for much much more. Stuck, sitting in slow to stopped traffic. Just sitting and wondering why. And then the traffic would slowly inch forward. It would slowly move, slowly separate itself again. And then…? And then nothing. Traffic would just be on the move again. Every once in a while there would be signs of a crash, or drivers on the shoulder in a stalled out car. Sometimes a cop would have pulled someone over. But most often there was nothing. No explanation at all. Traffic had been stopped and now it was moving again. Annoying. It was annoying as all hell. That’s why it was a phantom jam. Something had happened and it took so long to recover that by the time traffic started moving again, the evidence was long gone.

Patrick hated it. He hated not knowing. He wanted to drive free. He wanted to be able to move forward.

Instead he was stuck. In a rut. In a routine. It seemed like it was every day. He debated taking a different route, but for some reason always settled on the same one. Every day. He hit the same stretch of freeway and traffic always ground to a crawl. He could be speeding along, going fifty or sixty miles per hour and suddenly have to slam on his brakes and be going ten. He thought he should have learned by now that this was where traffic always did this to him, and yet he was always caught off guard. He wondered why he couldn’t learn that. He thought he must be lucky to have not crashed into someone yet.

Stuck in stalled traffic, Patrick looked back and forth to the other lanes. All the drivers seemed annoyed. Nobody ever likes traffic jams, especially phantom traffic jams. He looked at the cross on the side of the road. It always made him sad. Someone hadn’t made it. Either they missed the fact that traffic was slowing, or they blew a tire and crashed out of control, or a drunk driver hit them, or any number of other tragedies. But the cross at the side of the road with pictures and flowers always meant the same thing—someone had died here. It always made Patrick sad when he saw that. He had noticed the cross a week ago. Someone was bringing fresh flowers every day. Patrick felt compelled to stop and pay some sort of respects, but he never did. He couldn’t bring himself to. It was just too sad. If he did, it would mean he would have to fully acknowledge his own driving and then have to make a change in the way he did what he did. But he didn’t want to face his own mortality. He wasn’t ready for it. Instead he would just follow his routine of speeding until he had to slam on his brakes and then notice the cross again and again in passing. It was not a good plan, but it was the one he planned on keeping. He didn’t want to see it. Something made him look each day, but he didn’t want to know. Someday he would stop. Someday he would look at it and face the truth. Someday he would see the name. The name, that secret name he didn’t want to see and didn’t want to know. The name on the cross read ‘Patrick’ and would reveal to him the truth—his truth. But as long as he didn’t see it, he didn’t have to realize it, and he certainly wouldn’t have to give up his phantom routine quite yet.