Apocalyptic Traffic

A few days ago I was on my way to work after dropping Alyson off at the airport and I got myself in a traffic jam that led to this blog.

It all started as a normal drive back to the office after an airport drop off - things were going great and my ETA on Google Maps was a green number and the predicted time was what I expected.

I get off at my exit and my green number on Google Maps turns yellow and adds an extra 10 minutes instantly which I thought was odd. Sure there was a large line at the Anderson light after getting off the highway, but that tends to be normal. The light time is pretty short so it usually takes me a 2-3 light cycles to get through this area on a work day.

I'm pretty much stuck on the exit ramp so can't see much, but I see our light turn green and no one move - this happens for a few more light cycles and I can tell people around me are getting anxious. Right turn traffic is moving (albeit slowly), but my left turn traffic is making no progress.

We are hitting the 20 minute mark of being stationary and I'm getting anxious now and I can finally see above some movement. Cars are doing U-turns and heading back the other direction I just don't know why. Finally I can inch forward enough to look over the concrete wall of the highway exit and I see the train gate arms down, but no train crossing.

I'm finally piecing together what has happened - the train arms went down blocking the road, but no train came. Perhaps the trickle of traffic are the brave, but also pretty risky individuals who must be driving around the arms to bypass the block. However, I get closer and see what is going on. Police are now here with flares on the road guiding cars because without stop signs or stop lights its pandemonium on the streets.

The problem being that hundreds of cars are turning down this road not expecting the blockage, compared with everyone getting off the highway here and alongside everyone out for themselves has made a hectic situation. People forgot the rule of traffic of not entering the intersection unless you can safely leave it - so as lights turn green there is no passage for anyone.

It was an old fashion grid lock and it got me thinking about all the apocalyptic movies where cars are jammed up on all roads just abandoned. This was only a brief 20-25 minutes of terrible traffic jams, but I can see how believable it is that roads become a graveyard of abandoned cars.

There are always the people that think they are more important or rather oblivious to the situation at hand. We may have a hundred cars turning around, but one car is going to honk and push their way through determined to not make that U-turn like every other car. Maybe they are having an emergency and going to ramp it through the grass - who knows, but they aren't the first nor last to make the situation more stressful for everyone.

In the era of AI - I asked Claude to simply merge these various 1 minute traffic cam videos together, speed it up to make it 40 seconds long and optimize it without sound. A couple minutes later the video above was produced and it helps show the situation I dealt with. Nothing crazy nor major, but when my 8 minute ETA became 34 minutes - something went wrong before Google Maps knew to route me away.

I could only imagine in a real situation how quick things would tumble. Imagine all the train arms dropping globally would lead to instant gridlock. Sure folks may eventually ram the arms down, but not without immense delays and traffic backing up to unbelievable points. What I didn't really explain well is the side effect of a single blocked road - traffic to that point blocks up as well. So the intersections prior to this one couldn't allow more traffic, so they blocked up.

You need a live Google Maps set of algorithms to reroute people, but at some point there is too much traffic and things can't resolve themselves in any quick pace. I remember in the news a long time ago how a traffic jam lasted over 10 days in China - so I know things can blow out of proportion.

It's just so interesting to me how fragile our infrastructure is because at the end of the day fragile people operate among it.