Gridlock

Politicians and the news media misuse the term gridlock a lot. They use it to describe heavy traffic. Anyone that's read Ben Elton's novel, appropriately called, "Gridlock" will know what the term means.

Anyone trying to get out of Brisbane city this afternoon will also know what it means if they didn't before.

They closed off the Riverside Expressway because engineers found a crack and were worried it might collapse. The news story is here.

Those empty roads you can see in the picture are usually full of traffic in the afternoon rush hour.

See that row of buses on the bridge? You can only see about a third of that bridge and it's buses all the way across. You could have walked across on bus roofs and not had to touch the ground once. I would have taken my own photo of them, but unfortunately I didn't have a clear shot.

At the intersection where those buses actually get into the city we sat and waited for a few changes of lights before my bus driver decided we'd be there all night if he didn't get creative.

The look on the faces of passengers on another bus when they saw us pull up at the next set of lights was classic. We were on the wrong side of the road. I'm sure that's something Dave and Jimmy would dearly love to do sometimes. I have a friend that's just got a job driving buses for Brisbane Transport, I bet that's not something they'll teach him.

I hate to think what time I would have got home if we'd stayed at that intersection much longer, but Donna was waiting on the front steps for me and Sarah, my youngest stepdaughter, actually started walking up to the bus stop to see where I was.

Apparently the expressway is going to be closed for a few days, so traffic is going to be a tad heavier for the rest of the week. They're going to let cars use some of the bus and transit lanes for a while. Great! Those of us smart enough to use public transport to get to work will have to put up with idiots using the bus lanes to jump the queue and cause bottlenecks further up the road.

I'll keep my camera handy and hopefully get a few pics.