Why I hate motorways

There are few things that I can truly say I don’t appreciate. Most of life’s little annoyances I can handle if not with grace, with a certain stoic fortitude. But I’ve decided that I hate the traffic on the gateway motorway. Every Wednesday I travel from Ipswich to Sandgate to teach, along with just about every car that has rolled off a production line since Henry Ford decided pushbikes weren’t his thing.

We head north in a sick mechanical parody of wildebeests crossing a river, all converged nose to tail going nowhere fast while the more assertive ones make horn noises and jostle for position. We travel on a road optimistically marked 90 at around the speed of a pre toddling toddler creating long lines of blinking red stop lights and smokey exhausts.

But this I can handle, its part of city life nowadays and peak hour traffic is a fact of life. What I detest, passionately, is the return trip.

One would think that once the majority of the cars had reached their destinations and traffic density drops to a mere fraction of the herd, one would be able to enjoy the motoring sensation of moving forward at a reasonable speed; of seeing the needle pass 60 and in a way that justifies owning a vehicle that can travel faster than you can walk.

But it is not to be. Roadworks spring up along with signs, heavy machinery and lots of flashing lights. Clogging the road and turning the whole motorway into a strobed nightmare of delay and frustration.

First they close one lane, backing up traffic and forcing us to merge (careful to avoid being trampled by trucks) as we pass some bloke whose job appears to be to wave an illuminated cone up and down. Then they close the other lane and we all move to the other side, again testing the skill and tactical competence of my fellow motorists.

Now as I was conducting this mechanical gumby ballet two things occurred to me, firstly, that when I’d travelled this road a few hours earlier it had seemed in perfectly functional condition. I should know, as at the speed we’d been moving I got a long look indeed. The second thing that struck me was that while I was passing signs and hundreds of plastic witches hats, utes with flashing arrows and police cars with their lights on, I didn’t seem to be passing anyone who was actually doing anything to the road. There’s a certain oxymoron to the term “road work” when no ones actually repairing the road. I considered perhaps they meant the road was working, but again this wasn’t the case as all the activity and bother had it functioning somewhere between a parking lot and a spruiker for panel beaters.

Its frustrating. And my frustration wasn’t helped by their signs, apart from the odd speed sign suggesting that in the distant past this tarmac torment actually facilitated travel there are ones such “please drive carefully” and “end roadwork.” The latter I can only imagine is probably needed since it wasn’t like I could detect anything happening. It had no beginning, no middle and no end, at least as far as the “work” part was concerned. And all brightly illuminated with flood lights and generators to remove any lingering doubt that there was a purpose to it.
But the one that really got me riled was the large billboard that read “speed kills”! Steam started coming out my ears, I started ranting “how would you possibly know that, were moving at speed where if your theory was correct driving a hearse out here would raise the dead” I mean didn’t their bloody parents teach them not to play in traffic! Mine did. And now I know why. Clearly if you don’t beat this habit early in life people move on to clog highways dressed in “high visibility” fashion disasters and hardhats. I passed a long line of large machines, looking somewhere between a combine harvester and a mining truck, all doing nothing. A lone tetra-bloke stood waving his cone in an up and down in a gesture that looked a little too similar to sexual self abuse to be taken in good grace.

I’m not sure if he was being self descriptive of it was aimed at us, their hapless motoring prey!
Then they closed both lanes! Yep they detoured (derived from the latin dēterrēre meaning to prevent or hinder) us off the highway and into the darkened mess of eagle farm. Here we struggled around more high visability light wankers and a mass of signs with helpful information such as “Detour” (just in case some of us thought our bloody homes had moved in the time it was taking us to reach them. Continental drift was certainly occurring at a similar speed I’m sure.) At one stage I was passing boats!

But by far the worse part, the bit that really got to me was on rejoining the motorway I passed five signs, two police cars and five large industrial road machines without seeing any anything happening. I was starting to look for any sign that this wasn’t some sick joke when I saw him. Dayglow sloth man! Clad in a retina assaulting yellow jumpsuit he leant against the guard rail. This bastard wasn’t even supporting his own body weight! And from the look of it he was serenading the shovel he had lovingly crooked in his arm. As my car slowly crawled past at the legally enforced parody of speed he made no detectable movement at all. If it wasn’t for the odd blink and movement of his lips he could have been a mannequin. I actually entertained running the bastard over, just to see if he would move, but I suspect there are laws against that. How else could his particular blend of lethargy and sloth have been successfully passed down through the generations.

At this point the sheer idiocy of the whole situation became blindingly apparent. Whats the point of repairing a road if were all going to spend time moving along it at 40? People can run faster than that! I mean you can navigate a goat track at that speed, if they aren’t going to let us move any faster than it doesn’t matter what the road surface is like! I think I’m going to write to the gateway motor corporation and ask for my money back. Damned if I see why I should pay toll to use a motorway when it doesn’t function as one. And maybe to the mains roads department. Those little sighs that warn of upcoming sign holders (???) should be changed from alert stick men briskly brandishing signs to something more recognizably related to reality. Turn the sign upside down, have the stick man leaning on it and scratching his bum! At least we’d know what to expect@!