Traffic Challenges once Schools Restart
on George Hamilton (Jamaica), 07/Sep/2011 02:01, 34 days ago
Well it was an eventful morning wait for the bus today.All sorts of things were moving apart from the traffic.Unfortunately a bus is a kind of traffic and it was going nowhere too.I think that it was somewhere around the corner in the Papine direction out of sight.My mistake, the definition of traffic implies some sort of movement.The vehicles on the road were basically just parked.I took all my photos the next day when the traffic was not quite as bad and I had my camera. Here are parked cars going up the hill and away from downtown. This is pretty congested traffic when you consider how empty the Gardiner Expressway is in Toronto heading away from downtown on work day mornings while all the people who live in suburbia try to get downtown heading in the other direction.A closer up photo of the yellow city bus and the coaster that are in the background of the photo above. I always have difficulty finding sufficiently detailed coaster photos on the Internet.Talking about sight, this was near the fatal bus stop where on January 4, 2011 a lady had driven into the people waiting for a bus on the opposite side of the road.Many were from the blind institution close by.She killed two, injured five others and demolished the bus stop.Any blind people may not even have seen the car speeding towards them from across the road - very tragic.Time flies, I’m surprised that was eight months ago.In order to retain this blog's general viewer rating I edited out a gory part from the bottom of the Gleaner picture.I speculate that too many people were getting killed and injured so close to the Matilda Corners police station. Because of this the word had been passed to them down the command chain that this was not to happen in the future.So the local police had strategically placed traffic beacons down the middle of the road and watched them attentively to ensure no impatient drivers pass the queued school traffic recklessly. Also the police ensure that the drivers do not run over and squash the beacons.This effectively restricted traffic to one lane going in both directions.This section is one of those scary stretches of road in Kingston that are tantalizingly not quite wide enough for three vehicles to safely drive side by side down the road.My estimate is 2 3/4 vehicles wide.When the magic number of three vehicles wide arrives, there are no alternatives but for one of the three drivers to brake, drive with one wheel on the sidewalk, reverse if going slowly and from out of town, or accelerate to pass quickly and sound the horn so that the magic number goes down to two again.The last option depends on the driver coming the other way not having the same idea as you.If so, the magic number instantly goes back to three with results that require the presence of an ambulance.The middle of the road belongs to whichever driver staked the claim first.There are no lines to cramp anyone’s style, so to speak.I made another mistake. Due to cultural differences between Canada and Jamaica.Braking and reversing may generally not be an option in Jamaica.This is quite a busy section of road as you can see the from the foot of the Jamaican Society for the Blind news article photo on the crash:These foreign drivers in the photo that follows are lucky. They have more than three lanes to drive in, seat belts and a one way traffic system too. Possibly Old Hope Road on a morning when schools are back in operation again might be too much of a challenge for them?To summarize:1) In an ideal Jamaican world Old Hope Road can handle 2¾ vehicles going in either direction across its width.2)The police traffic beacons reduced the maximum lanes down to two .3) The St Peter and St Paul school has opened for the new term and traffic trying to get into it is backed up onto Old Hope Road and blocks one of the lanes so now we are down to one lane for traffic going in both directions. Non-Jamaican drivers might erroneously think should not be a problem, but remember the Jamaican rules about no braking and no reversing.Here's the church in front of the school. The school itself is quite large and is behind the trees in the background. Here are cars lined up inside the property almost making their way back solidly to the road.Meanwhile up the hill, a white van is in the process of trying to make a turn across the oncoming parked vehicles into the gas station and is now positioned at an angle a few inches in front of a brown car aiming up the hill.No problems?Wrong– problems.Remember the rule about no reversing mentioned above.About 10 minutes later the white van situation catches the attention of the two police officers in front of the police station who were actively monitoring the traffic beacons.They amble the 5 chains (100 yards or meters) up the hill and intervene.An active discussion follows for a few minutes and the white van eventually backs up once to give enough room for it to turn in front of the brown car that never did reverse.So here’s a late breaking traffic score – Brown Car 1, White Van Lost.The driver of the white van will probably have to emigrate to somewhere less extreme than Jamaica or have the van painted another color so people do not recognize it in future. As a person who is semi in tune with the Jamaican way of thinking, I'm glad I did not take a photo of this, I would have felt embarrassed for the driver.