Traffic Travails

I just remembered how much I despise traffic.

I had completed some paperwork this afternoon for the Communications class I'm teaching at Rhode Island College and was on my way home. Rhode Island, as you know, is a small state. In fact, it's the nation's smallest. It doesn't advertise this, but then again, neither does Delaware. Would you?

Anyway, Lil' Rhody also is the nation's second most densely populated state after New Jersey. Let's make a comparison: There are one million people living in Rhode Island. There are 1.8 million people in Nebraska. Yet you can fit 76 Rhode Islands in Nebraska. No wonder the roads seem so expansive and vacant in the Cornhusker State and so clogged in the Ocean State.

My point is you add a lot of people with their cars and cram them into a small space with limited room for roads and voila, you get congestion. Providence is a pretty small city compared to typical American metropolises, but I can see now how a transportation group rated it as one of the worst bottlenecks. in the country.

And it was in that bottleneck that I sat for some time, grimacing and groaning.

The good news is I rarely get caught in these traffic jams. My commute is nil as a freelance writer, and my classes have been early afternoon affairs, so driving to the schools has barely registered on the Frustration Index.

I don't know how folks do a long, daily commute. I guess they grind their way through it, and, in time, get used to it. Maybe some like it; after all, it is alone time. You can sing as if you're in the shower, call a few friends, or plan your life for the next week.

But, me, I'd rather be somewhere else than stuck on a piece of asphalt.