Worlds Violently Colliding

Up Yours, Henry Ford.

Today it took me 90 minutes to get home from work. It should take half that time, or less. Why did it take so long? Two accidents, on two major roads. That's it.

Here is what happened: On 76 East, a severe accident shut down both inbound lanes into the city, which backed it up for over 7 miles. On 276 East, another bad accident shut down the turnpike, backing it up for over 10 miles. That's bad enough. But of course, it gets worse.

All of the connecting roads that feed into 76 and 276, such as 476, one of the roads I take home, were backed up for miles. On top of that, the westbound lanes were also backed up, with gaper delays. I promptly decided I would take back roads to get home, but that didn't fair much better. The back roads are full of traffic lights, stop signs, and moronic drivers who won't go faster than 20 MPH. Not to mention the hordes of soccer moms driving Ford SUVs with Penn State stickers on the back; they are the worst.

As frustrating and infuriating as my ride home was, it got me thinking at the same time. It's amazing that we as a nation have developed so many traffic systems that rely on every piece of them working properly. There are no failsafes, no backups, no real alternatives to getting around traffic accidents. You sit and wait, or you take back roads and double your driving time. All the while, we spew more pollutants into the air and get angrier and meaner as a whole.

Several years ago here in Philly, some teens set fire to a tire yard in the Port Richmond section of the city. The tire yard was next to I-95, a major north-south arterial road. The fire was so intense that it melted several portions of the road, causing those lanes to be permanently shut down for months. It took years before they were finished with the repair construction. In the mean time, people just had to deal with the delays, as there are no good, fast ways around that area of 95; only surface streets which are very slow, and have lights or stop signs every block. That single incident, caused by a group of teenagers, cost PA taxpayers six million ($6,000,000.00) dollars for the repairs.

If that incident alone didn't showcase the vulnerability of our traffic systems, nothing will. Think of the sheer havoc one could cause with strategic destruction of portions of major highways. Hell, it only took two accidents, albeit well-positioned accidents, to close down two of the largest highways in Philly this afternoon, and back up several others.

Imagine if the cars in those accidents exploded. Imagine if one of them had been a tanker carrying a combustible liquid. Imagine if someone had filled a rig with a fertilizer bomb, and then purposely wrecked it on the road. Imagine if they do it on an overpass, or a double-decked freeway, or a tunnel. Do it right, and you could not only kill dozens of people, but also shut down several lanes for who knows how long. A big enough fire, as the I-95 example proved, would melt rebar, crumble concrete, and crack key foundations. Not only would something like that scare the hell out of people for a long time, the rerouted traffic patterns would serve as a reminder of the incident for a long time to come (in the same way that the rerouted manhattan subway reminds you of the 9/11 attacks).

The Philadelphia area would be crippled for months, even years, without I-76 connecting NJ to the PA Turnpike. Boston's roadways are so terrible that they had to begin the Big Dig project to try to alleviate the mess. Baltimore needs I-95 like humans need air. Don't get me started on New York and Los Angeles. Our large cities would be pretty devastated if even a few of our major roadways were severed. I'll admit that I'm not the brightest person in history, so someone, somewhere must have thought of all of this already. I doubt anything I've written here was very original. And I'm sure that someone with nothing to lose could pull off what I described without a hitch. And what a horrible, glorious mess they would cause if they did.

This is what I thought of while sitting in my car, trying to get home this afternoon.

You know it's time to clean when...

Cleaned up my room, and I happened upon some very old CDs that I probably should have thrown away a long time ago, but in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't. They are, from left to right:

1. Slackware Linux 3.4 
2. Graphics CD containing such software as Aldus Photostyler (Aldus was bought out by Adobe back in the early 90s) and the first version of Kai's Power Tools.  
3. An Apogee's Greatest Games CD, containing classics like Commander Keen and the original Duke Nukem.