Vidya Rajaram's Blogspace

Traffic - Which way ?

Chennai roads were blocked this morning. Completely. No , not blocked by the police - blocked by traffic. I guess this was the worst traffic day Chennai had to see. Actually traffic's been bad since yesterday evening. I did ask a couple of people - looks like everyone's had a bad time.

It took me one hour and fifty minutes (Iam not exaggerating) to reach Alwarpet from Velachery . And I have this habit of reaching office really early ! Iam usually in office by 830 AM Max. I could not drive beyond gear 2 and I think I must have emptied atleast a litre of petrol in excess.

So I was trying to analyse the reasons for this traffic circus today :

1. Vadapalani Temple Kumbabhishekham was scheduled for today. As we all know , the traffic in Vadapalani is pretty bad on normal days itself. Today , they had re routed the traffic on Vadapalani - Kodambakkam road - in effect congesting other roads
2. Schools reopened today after a couple of days of holidays ( Onam , Varalakshmi Nombu etc). This added to the traffic
3. Lot of traffic routes have been changed across the city. I think the morning papers carried the route diagrams as usual
4. The number of traffic policemen on the road were less today
5. The traffic signals were not working
6. And above all , no one was being patient enough to listen to good old samaritans / policemen who were clearing the jams wherever they were :P

And these are the times when you should sit back , roll down the windows ( the weather is exceptionally pleasant in Chennai these days) , and turn up the volume and listen to your favorite songs which you dont get time to ! :)

posted by Vidya Rajaram @ 8/30/2007 04:27:00 PM