The city is still there. The arts still thrives. The tech revolution rolls along making new millionaires by the day and upending the property prices.
The food is still superb.
The people are still stylish, sophisticated and wonderful.
But the TRAFFIC is appalling.
It is a daily horror story.
People are forced to sit in their cars for hours and hours on end in gridlocks.
They can be backed up on the roads for an hour or more, simply trying to get from point A to point B. When it is not gridlock, it what the commentators call “stop-go" traffic conditions.
Yes, they have people employed all day long reporting on the traffic conditions on local radio. It is a full-time business because the problems are constant.
There are the bridges. SF has a bay that must be crossed by bridge and everyone seems to need to cross, so they have to queue on the approach roads.
Then there are the feeder road bottlenecks which cause backups.
New lights have been introduced at some motorway entrance lanes which feed the cars in one or two at a time. That is an improvement.
But, basically, there are too many cars and they are in too much of a hurry.
Once, it was a world of good, pushy drivers. They did a lot of lane changing but they did it with skill and a general chutzpah.
Now they weave across the lanes heedlessly.
There is a new generation of bad drivers out there and they are scary dangerous. They are impatient and foolhardy. They don’t “get” it.
They cut in front of each other causing people to brake.They zoom right across three lanes of traffic and then, dammit, zoom back, as if they simply can’t decide which lane they want.
They are manic weavers.
Some of them drive at insane speeds.
And, guess what?
There are a lot of accidents. Far more than there used to be.
Every accident is another traffic jam.
The radio commentators will report on the lane closures, the arrival of the tow trucks and ambulances.
They will estimate the length of delay which may ensue.
They will describe the size of the traffic jam. Miles, sometimes.
There is some bizarre irony to be stuck, stationary in traffic jams in a $300,000 sports car. All that beautiful technology sitting there idle.
Traffic jams are great equalisers, really. You can have just as uncomfortable a full bladder any car.
The traffic is now so bad that brave San Franciscans make a joke of it and adjust their lives to making wildly early departures to get anywhere on time. They talk of zen techniques to cope with sitting in jams running late for things.
But they are wasting both masses of their time and a phenomenal amount of fuel.
Despite all the spaghetti junctions and layers of super roads, their cars have outgrown their city.
I love SF but I could never live with that stress.
It is a very sad thing to say, but both Bruce and I were glad to get out of town.
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