“There Are Too Many People On This Road And I’m Not One Of Them!”

You’re not stuck in traffic, you are traffic.

In my home city of Vancouver, British Columbia, traffic… isn’t great. I’m sure your city is similar. In fact, if you live in a town of more than about 15,000 people—I’m confident you’ve complained about traffic before.

You’ve likely complained about it, though, as if it’s an external force being imposed on YOU by OTHERS.

That’s not the case.

Take the example of North Vancouver, BC—a suburb city of Vancouver—where folks commute in droves to The Big Smoke via one of two bridges, or the SeaBus, the city’s most unique form of public transit.

Traffic on the bridges is bad at the best of times—and when something goes wrong, say an incident or just extreme volume, the entire region becomes a parking lot.

So North Vancouver folks want a third bridge crossing. They’re petitioning for it.

Of course, this is nothing new. Folks in every city in North America are asking for new highways, bridges and tunnels.

Except it never solves the problem. Like, never.

Imagine a river. If you widened it, would it run shallower? Nope. What happens is something like THIS.

You create demand and traffic fills it. To capacity. Then the same problems persist except now you’ve spent millions of dollars.

The underlining issue is that commuters see themselves as victims of traffic, not perpetrators of it. And they likely will never change.

So we have to change our perception—and stop rewarding commuters for creating traffic and start asking them to pay up, or find a new way to work.