Where has all the traffic gone?

It’s something I have often wondered myself. Why on one morning – say a Tuesday – traffic would crawl along William Hovell drive between Coulter Drive and Bindubi St, whereas on Wednesday it’d flow quite nicely. Mondays and Fridays I can understand – they’re the likely days when someone’s going to decide to take a long weekend – but the midweek stuff has always had me confused.

The link in dtc’s post does make a lot of sense though. God knows how many times I’ve been held up, expecting to come up to some flashing red and blue lights…only to somehow seem to cross some imaginary line where traffic goes back to normal. It’s always baffled me.

EvanJames said :

We have gridlock from Qbn into Canberra every morning, so I notice when it suddenly doesn’t lock up and is actually crawling. School holidays are marvellous in this respect, do the mothers driving their kids to school really make such a difference? Mondays and Fridays are usually less awful too, especially Fridays. Around Xmas is bliss. Wednesdays are the worst, horrible.

My theory about Wednesdays is that quite a few people work part time, like Mon-Wed or Wed-Fri. So on Wednesday everybody is going to work, which results in a traffic clusterf*ck. The GDE and Parkes Way are generally parking lots on Wednesdays so I try to travel very early or very late.

Otherwise, as dtc pointed out, it’s generally the butterfly effect, ie a small event at one point has major consequences a long way away. I recall sometime last year I think there was a walkathon which used the traffic lights on the northside of the Commonwealth avenue bridge at peak hour. This wedged the bridge, which eventually wedged everywhere else. I spent nearly an hour travelling along Parkes that day, when it usually takes me a few minutes.

Or it could be that the Reptoids have finally started their program of major abductions for food, anal probing etc. 🙂

We have gridlock from Qbn into Canberra every morning, so I notice when it suddenly doesn’t lock up and is actually crawling. School holidays are marvellous in this respect, do the mothers driving their kids to school really make such a difference? Mondays and Fridays are usually less awful too, especially Fridays. Around Xmas is bliss. Wednesdays are the worst, horrible.

Lots of public servants take leave after the Budget is handed down (after working long hours putting the thing together).

I use Hindmarsh into Fyshwick every day and have noticed a dramatic reduction in traffic in the last week too.

Since the roadworks commenced on the Monaro bridge over Canberra Ave, more people seemed to turn onto Hindmarsh seemingly to skip that bottleneck and take a detour through Fyshwick.

Often its due to a traffic blockage miles from where you are. I remember one day the traffic was banked up going into Civic right across Commonwealth Bridge, all around London Circuit and so forth. The cause was the construction of the new ANU residence on Marcus Clarke St had blocked off a lane on Barry drive, and the merging was too hard for most people and slowed everything down. Which banked up Barry Drive, then Northbourne, then London Cct, then Capital Hill, then Commonwealth Avenue, into Barton etc etc.

As you will know from driving into a 60km/h zone after driving along a highway (looking at you, Braidwood), even a slight slowing down of traffic flow has a significant consequential effect and gets worse the more traffic involved. A 10 second delay at the start of traffic can lead to 5 minute delay a couple of km down the road. (this is why, by the way, if there are two areas of road works along a highway, it is actually quicker to block the entire lane for the whole distance, rather than block, allow 2 lanes, then merge into one lane again – 1 lane all the way is quicker than requiring a merger).

This article explains some of it http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071219103102.htm

God’s country? – i don’t think god wears ugg boots as his “going out clothes”

djk said :

NFI in relation to the OP’s question as I dont use Monaro, but I find traffic is lighter (well to be precise more spread out time-wise) on Friday mornings. Anyone else find this?

I noticed the same thing and came to the conclusion that it’s a cobmination of rostered days off, part time workers and people just generally being more relaxed about getting to work on time on a Friday.

poetix said :

Just interested as to why Queanbeyan is being referred to as ‘God’s Country’?

The same reason people with red hair are called “Bluey”?

Now… don’t look… or you will turn into salt rock…

poetix said :

Just interested as to why Queanbeyan is being referred to as ‘God’s Country’?quote]

I think it’s pretty obvious.