TRAFFIC JAM: It’s HIS/HER fault.

The thing about living in an urban area is that traffic jams are near unavoidable. I live in Subang, where traffic has become part and parcel of daily working life. The month I look forward to the most is December, where the school-kids take a break, and working people get to take a logistical break as well. But having driving in and out of Subang for years now, I’ve come to some conclusions about why we have traffic jams and what are some of the steps we can do to ease the left-foot’s burden on the clutch. I’m using Subang Jaya as a case study because I know it well enough, but I think the principles apply to almost all places.

1. Blame the local government. Seriously, Subang Jaya has about 4 entry points. 2 entry points from the Federal highway that comes at either end of Subang Parade and 2 entry points from the LDP that swings in from USJ 20. No matter how many flyovers and underpasses are built, it all still converges on the same entry/exit. In fact, the high tech flyovers, when they converge, it’s a classic bottleneck scenario, from 3 flyovers with 2 lanes each (that’s 6 lanes) combining to one major street of just 3 lanes (and then narrowing to 2 shortly after). How not to have a traffic jam. BAD town planning. Yes, blame the government. Vote against them.

2. Blame the selfish drivers who abuse the greenlight. At the height of rush hour, the roads get clogged to brim. This happens especially at intersections or t-junctions. Despite looking ahead and seeing that the road after the traffic light is filled to the edge, the pass the green light anyway (which fair enough, is their right to do so). The selfish cars then end up spilling out into the intersection and hogging the entire road. What happens after that is the traffic light turns red, and it’s the other lane’s turn to move. But they can’t, because the cars have created a barrier at the intersection. So people honk. So two other lanes suffer simply because a few drivers wanted to maximize their right to the green light and save 2 minutes of their own time and waste 10 minutes of hundreds of other people’s time.

3. Blame the selfish people who cut lanes. Drivers who go up all the way to the end of the turning lane and cut in to the traffic lane are the number one cause of traffic jams. Cutting Q is pretty unethical.

I’ve committed the above before, so I’m not much better. The key thing here is that traffic jams are not caused solely by the government and their bad development plans. It’s easy for us to point fingers and say that it’s someone else’s fault, especially the government, because we voted for them to do a good job. The truth is, in Subang anyway, a lot of drivers don’t do their part to make the town a better place, but feed their selfish interests and screw other people along the way. The votes of these people, especially if it’s habitual and done without conscience, and continually asking for traffic jams to decrease, should be considered spoilt votes.

We can’t solve traffic problems unless we start giving way and stop hogging the roads as if our great-grandfather owns the tar and the traffic lights.

It’s our fault. Not his, not hers, not theirs.

And this is the sick part of capitalism, but I’m not going to get into that in detail, except that it plays a titanic part in expanding our already greedy nature and making us more vain than ever.

Sigh. I love Subang. People are going to complain that Hannah Yeoh (the new ADUN) will get blamed if she doesn’t solve transport problems. But she shouldn’t be blamed. If she’s going to be at fault, it’s going to be because she didn’t tell her constituency off for being the main contributors of traffic jams, not because she didnt’ fix the roads.

So get a grip.