...then deal with the residents who have been here for fifty years and still drive ten miles an hour at the slightest hint of a flurry.
I am so one of those people. On an icy, hilly road, there's no such thing as too slow. A few years ago it snowed in Seattle late in the afternoon, just in time for the evening commute. The roads iced over and vehicles began to lose control. When I left work, I had no idea what awaited me on that commute. Never before or since, anywhere, have I seen anything remotely like it. The entire Seattle transportation grid locked up. It completely failed.
We've all been in traffic jams before. We've all been held up for an hour or even two on a drive that would only take ten minutes on the open road. This was not that. This was honest-to-goodness
gridlock, as in, thousands of people didn't make it home that night. Every freeway stopped. Most of the arterials stopped. I don't mean they were closed: I mean they
stopped...with several hundred thousand cars still on them. Nobody could get anywhere. The snow plows and sanders were stuck. Even the emergency services couldn't get anywhere. And as the traffic became more congested, the temperatures dropped and the roads became more unnavigable. Hundreds of people abandoned their cars and just walked away, sometimes not even bothering to drive over to the shoulder.
I didn't know any of this until later. I left work thinking I was so savvy. I had heard that the express lanes on Interstate 90 were totally blocked due to traffic accidents, and that the mainlines were clogged. So I figured I would Highway 520 instead. I should have realized something was afoot when it took me almost half an hour just to get
on to the freeway. We're talking four blocks. President Bush gave some kind of escalation speech that night; I listened to it on the radio. The whole speech was over before I even got across the Lake Washington bridge. By the time I got onto Interstate 405 at Bellevue the traffic was so bad that I figured I'd divert onto the sidestreets. A lot of good it did me. Fifty thousand people had the exact same idea. I could look and see the road in the distance, less than a mile away, and measure the time it took me to get there in half-hour increments.
At one point there was a particularly steep hill. Traffic was at a standstill all the way up. The roads were completely iced over at this point, so many of the cars couldn't make it up. This is Seattle. The roads rarely freeze here, so people don't carry chains. I didn't have any chains either. I was driving on plain old tires. I wasn't sure I would make it up the hill. The car right in front of me was having so much trouble that it kept going backwards more than forwards. I spent about three minutes just to change lanes, and I'm glad, too, because that car eventually did collide into the one behind it.
I actually
ran out of gas during this drive. Or at least I almost did. I stopped at a filling station and it took me ten minutes just to turn into it because traffic was not moving. All told, I used about a third of a tank of gas that night. By chance I had an energy bar and some water with me, or I wouldn't have eaten dinner. The radio had canceled its regular programming to talk about the traffic, but all they could really say is "Boy, traffic's still jammed up everywhere. Let's go to Copter 7. Copter?" "Yep, still jammed everywhere. Back to you!"
By the time I made it to Issaquah, which is on the edge of the Seattle metropolis, the traffic situation on Highway 900 was the polar opposite: No one was there. There were dozens of cars littered on the sides of the road, and dozens more that had wrecked, but no one was actually driving. I thought for a minute that the highway had actually been closed. No, it was still open. Then I figured that everyone who would normally be driving on it was either still in traffic, or had given up and checked into a motel. Highway 900 is a hilly, winding road in the foothills, filled with scenic ditches and gullies. It actually is a gorgeous drive, but on this occasion it was totally iced over. A plow had been there at some point, but somehow the two lanes had consolidated into one. Luckily I didn't pass a single car coming the other way. One car eventually made it behind me, and was probably ticked off that I was driving at about 10 miles an hour, but as I drove past spinout after spinout I figured that the folks behind me could just suck it.
I come from a desert. We don't get snow there any more than we do here. I've driven on snowy roads fewer than twenty days in my whole life, and iced roads fewer than ten days. I have no idea how to do it right. All I have are first principles from physics. Not quite as handy as chains, eh?
I arrived at my destination more than six hours after I left work, at about a quarter past eleven. That's for a drive that would take 25 minutes on a clear road. I could have spun out or driven off the road or collided with another car on any of a hundred occasions...including right at the end, on the sloping driveway. But I drove carefully, and, together with some luck, I got out of that night unscathed and a lot wiser.
Lest you forget why I'm telling this tale, the reason that the transportation grid seized up that hard is that people were driving too recklessly. They weren't prepared for ice any more than I was, but they figured they were invincible. Or they just didn't figure at all. A few dozen of them wrecked in key locations, and in so doing they locked up the roads of an entire metropolis. Granted, my travails were rewarded by my girlfriend with hot chocolate and kisses, but I wonder if she would have been quite as happy to see me if I had smashed her car. And I wonder how I would have felt if I had spun out in some nowhere place and had to walk fifteen miles in the snow in regular old shoes (probably uphill, fighting off wolves!) just to get to the hot chocolate and kisses...which at that point would have been
sooo not worth it.
