You're Part Of The Traffic Problem

I just heard the results of a recent study on SF Bay Area Traffic. Apparently, I'm not losing my mind: Bay Area commutes have gotten 80% worse in the last 7 years. I think I could have saved them some money and told them that! Bottom line, we need more capacity on our roads. But there are no plans to provide that anytime soon. Instead, we're subjected to endless projects to add metering lights at ingress points and convert existing capacity to HOV lanes. I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to wait another couple of decades before they finally have enough data to convince them of what I already know: that stuff doesn't work. We need more lanes for everyone to drive in. Everywhere.

Meanwhile, for the past few years, I've been commuting about 40 miles to and from work each day. While my commute to #Nutanix is about 30 minutes shorter (each way) than my commute to #GoPro, it's still pretty epic. Most days, I spend between 3 and 4 hours driving. Now, as you might imagine, while I'm driving, I have the opportunity to do a little "thinking" about traffic (ok, obsessing, really). I admit, I've shared some of my observations with my fellow drivers out loud, at high decibel, accompanied by expressive hand gestures, in real time. But this seems both futile and somewhat dangerous. Plus, it doesn't scale adequately.

What to do, then? If I can't get more lanes for the next couple of decades, I've decided to update and expand upon some advice that I shared a couple of years ago. Please feel free to share this with everyone you know. Maybe if enough people read this, it will help:

• If you own a pickup truck and you want to carry something in the back of it, strap it down securely. The rest of us are tired of dodging screen doors and rolls of insulation that you failed to secure. How hard could this be?
• Check your gas gauge. The big "E" stands for "Empty", and refers to the amount of gas in the gas tank. If the pointer is on "E", you do not have enough gas to drive from Hayward to Half Moon Bay. You only have enough gas to drive to just beyond the toll gates on the San Mateo Bridge. That is not far enough.
• If you are in a long line of stop-and-go traffic, maintain a standard distance behind the car in front of you and keep up with the ebb and flow. If you do not do this and you irregularly remain stopped while everyone else goes, your friends on the road will either ram you or cut in front of you.
• If you have left a large gap in front of you in stop-and-go traffic and someone cuts in front of you, don't get all angry and give the finger so that the offending driver can see it in the rear view mirror. If you wanted to "own" that space, you should have put your car there.
• If you are driving a Harley or BMW with side compartments and those really wide handlebars, DO NOT SPLIT LANES. There is no room for you. You are a menace. Plus, you are not really capable of driving faster than the rest of us. You just scare us, so we slow down and try to make way. 
• If you are driving a fast motorcycle with a custom paint job and matching helmet and you want to bypass four lanes of traffic that have *suddenly* come to a complete stop, DO NOT SPLIT LANES. Eventually, this behavior will lead to a horrific accident, and we will be forced to inch past your sorry carcass for the next two hours. Stories of guys like you make the traffic reports every single day of the week. If you insist on driving unsafely, put some protection around you. Buy a van.
• If you drive a van with the back windows blacked out, replace your Stones t-shirt with a nice Van Heusen collar shirt, snuff out the smokes, tuck the ponytail out of the way, and hold off playing your sub-woofer-intensive tunes with the windows rolled down until you get to your own driveway. Otherwise, we'll all be trying to catch glimpses of whoever you have tied up in the back, and that makes it hard for us to drive safely.  
• If you attend high school and find that you must respond to a critical text message immediately or else you won't score a date to the prom, get off the road and stay off until after you've earned an MBA and paid back Mom and Dad. If you find this to be impossible, please try to crash the car into the guy with the pickup truck before he gets going so fast that stuff flies out of the back.
• Do not put your kids in the front seat. Your kids should be in the back seat. I see this at least once a day. It's ridiculously dangerous, and if they get hurt, it is categorically your fault.
• If you notice a long line of cars stopped in an exit lane and you also need to exit there, join them at the back of the line. Do not inch along in the next lane over, slowing down all traffic behind you, then cut across the landscaping at the last possible moment and join the head of the line. It is a series of idiotic moves like that which created the exit lane holdup in the first place. Plus, in that one move, you amass so much negative karma that your relationships and career will literally implode before your eyes. Evil never pays.
• If you work for a city or township, do not trim trees or bushes along the roadway during rush hour. We see your little orange cones, and we can't believe that you had the gall to place them in the fast lane. It's rush hour. The trees can wait.
• If you are in management at CalTrans, consider increasing your overtime budget. Why on earth would you schedule construction along the Mission Blvd cut-over between 880 and 680 for M-F, 8a-5p for the next 12 weeks? Didn't you get the memo about both the school year and the NFL season starting up again? Instead, spend some time on that stretch of road overnight, like the rest of us are doing while we wait in the epic backups you've just created.
• City planners: stop putting sports stadiums at major commute crossroads. Between the games and the concerts and the (cancelled) Girl Scout camp-outs, you are destroying dinnertime with the kids 60 nights a year for those of us who must drive past in order to get home. If your stadium backup creates so much traffic that I can turn on the radio and listen to the pre-game, live game and post-game wrap up all while inching past the stadium, you have failed. I won't forget this, come election time.
• Whoever keeps posting "Watch out for pedestrians on all roads" on those highway emergency signs is a numbskull. Seriously. While everyone slows to read the emergency sign message, I am stuck in the middle of an 8-lane highway on the Sunol grade. If I get a chance to inch forward 100 yards, I'm not stopping for some idiot on a nature hike.

If you travel back and forth to work, day after day, in driving conditions like these, lighten up. Take a deep breath. Relax. This commuting thing, like working for Bay Area tech companies, is a marathon, not a sprint. It's not worth your life nor someone else's. And, someday soon, someone, somewhere, is going to solve this thing. Don't you want to be alive to enjoy it? I do!