tooth soup

photo credit: redhuntingcap

Warning: Rant ahead. No insightful thoughts contained within.

This last week hasn’t been particularly brilliant for driving. I’m one of those people that actually enjoys getting in their car every morning and driving to work (or in my case, university). This is lucky, because there’s bugger all buses that run from my house to my university (and I crash the journey planner at Transperth if I try and find out some way to do it). The journey from my house to university takes approximately 20 minutes (or, one-and-a-half Opeth songs) on a good day, and on a bad day, such as today or Tuesday, one-and-a-half hours (or one Opeth album). Let me explain.

Curtin University is located on a long road called Manning Road. Just before the south entrance, there is a couple of sets of traffic lights that act as a sort of lock. One goes to let cars into the space between them, then the second set goes to let those through and the cars still waiting at the first set. It’s kind of fucked, but there’s no other way to do it, and it generally gets the job done without letting cars get backed up too far. The topography of the area is such that just before the first traffic light, there is a large hill which you can see exactly bugger-all over. The problem is that every year at the start of semester, you have about 5,000 or so new students driving to Curtin University for the first time in morning traffic. And they don’t really realise that the lights can back up cars over that hill. So on the first day of semester there is always, without fail for the last five years, an accident near the hill where someone hasn’t braked in time after seeing that there was a car just over the crest (and the speed limit is 70 kmph) that they couldn’t see a second before.

One accident such as this can back up traffic for about half of Manning Road, which is crap in itself, but it’s not the worst location that it can happen. That honour belongs to the right hand lane just after the second traffic light. If someone crashes here, that means that not only do people have to merge into one lane through a traffic light–I’m pretty sure that I could prove that merging is the single most jam-causing activity on the roads with a simple snapshot of the Freeway at 5pm–they then have to get back into the right hand lane in order to turn into the entrance to Curtin.

But that’s not all folks.

Upon turning into Curtin, you are faced with a big-arse front loader (we’re having all sorts of construction going on in order to build a new Chemistry building) and a guy with a stick saying ‘STOP’. So people can’t actually get 20 metres into Curtin witout getting stopped. Which blocks up the right hand lane, which blocks the two traffic lights, which blocks Manning Road all the way back up to Leech Highway (around 5 kilometres), which stops people from turning right from Leech Highway onto Manning, which backs up Leech Highway, which backs up Welshpool Road. Which pisses me right the fuck off, and results in me taking four times the usual journey time to get into university, which makes me really shirty for the morning.  Anyway, it could be worse. I could be the guy whose motorcycle got jammed under that ute.

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