Saturday, January 23, 2010

Traffic Jams in Big Cities

So, this is how it feels driving in big cities. We need to know the traffic schedule if we don't wanna get stuck in a traffic jam. I drive on highway 403 and 401 everyday, morning and evening. After a week or so, I found out that the traffic gets heavy in the morning around 9 am, and in the evening around 5 pm. The heavy traffic in the morning is not so bad. There are a lot of cars but all of them are moving well and sometimes slowly. The evening shift is the thing I need to consider before I hit the traffic. It is still okay to start driving at 4 o'clock because the traffic is still moving although it is very slow. It turns to be a total mess after 5 pm when all cars are actually stuck and there is no way we can do other than looking at other people on their steering wheels. It is good to have a company in this kind of situation because at this time a lot of people tend to be aggressive and angry. I see more traffic accidents when there are more cars. It is because most people just get mad and start to drive on their own without considering that they are currently sharing the road. Cases that happen most are when somebody sees an empty gap and thinks that it is the chance to change a lane when there is actually a car moving fast on that lane, and when somebody thinks that the traffic has become clear because he/she sees the cars start to move so that he/she impatiently accelerates the car and couldn't hit the brake in time when the car in front of him/her all of sudden stops.

I drive alone most of the time because my friends don't live far from school. I, myself have also experienced how annoying it is to be stuck in a traffic jam, to hit the gas and brake rapidly, and to see some drivers endanger me by cutting my lane and/or hit a brake so sudden in front of me. I don't have anybody with me who can calm me down. However, I find myself calm by listening to music. When I start to feel that the heat is getting higher, I turn the volume up and pretend that I am in a concert. This gives me a good reason to have an aftermarket car-audio which produces a better sound quality, thus relaxing.

The Introduction

After living in the biggest city of Kansas for exactly 5 years since September 2004, I finally migrated to the neighbor country on the northern hemisphere, Canada. I squeezed all the stuff I needed into my 2008 Honda Civic and went for a 2-day journey. Google map said that the distant only took approximately 18 hours, but I didn't want to take the risk since I was the only one driving and the only human being in the car. Thanks to my lovely sound system, yet not the best, that I had just installed like 2 weeks before I left Wichita, my driving experience turned to be exciting. I took a rest and stayed over night in the night of September 16th in 2009 in one of Chicago 2-star hotels. The immigration process went fine on the next day which made me decide to keep going instead of staying for another night in Detroit, MI. I crossed the border without any problem and without paying anything for importing my car from the U.S. to Canada. I arrived safely and had my stay for about a week in my friends' house in a quite city of Hamilton, ON. Finally, here I am in a very high multicultural city of Mississauga, ON, driving back and forth to North York, ON for school everyday.