I must admit, I've built a life where I, personally, don't have to deal much with traffic. I live in Central Pennsylvania, not an area with problems in general concerning traffic. Oh yeah, we may complain about the Carlisle Pike, but c'mon.
Yesterday my daughter and I went to the Phillies-Dodgers game, a businessperson's special. The game ended shortly after 4 PM.
We returned home around 9 PM. Traffic... everywhere. It really took a lot of the enjoyment of the game away.
I'm a big boy, I know that big cities have big traffic, but you tend to forget the scope of it when you're as spoiled as I am about traffic. Hell, I work at home. I, personally, probably drive less than 10 miles per day 4 days a week.
It's not like I'm not used to traffic. I learned to drive in California's Bay Area. Back in my previous job incarnation, I had to go to DC and Philadelphia semi-regularly. I've driven in traffic jams a lot, but now I'm completely out of practice.
And I prefer to be out of practice. The worst thing about traffic isn't the crappy behavior you see from other drivers, but the crappy feelings I find in myself. I feel ugly driving in that stuff, emotionally ugly. Frustrated. Judging people because of their lack of "fair play" in driving. Judging them because of their lack of attentiveness on the road. Judging them because they choose to live bunched together, yet with enough spread, that it creates such traffic.
Yep, I get ugly. It's not for me.
This isn't a rant about Philadelphia. I've been in worse traffic backups - I still have bad memories of an experience in Los Angeles, and yesterday seemed pretty similar to something we went through once in going from San Francisco to Livermore. This is just an acknowledgement - I hate this kind of traffic enough that I choose to live away from it, and plan to always live away from it. I have to dip in once in a while, but I just can't make it part of my everyday life.
