Merry Christmas, and Thank-You

Anyone who uses Highway 1 to commute to Vancouver knows that the past handful of years haven’t been a cakewalk. Come to think of it, the only good thing about the freeway has been the lack of police presence.

Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE when the police are there to catch all the HOV cheaters and the people who didn’t get the memo that texting and talking on cell phones is I-L-L-E-G-A-L here. But whenever there’s a police car, there’s a standstill on the freeway. The absence of freeway shoulders had temporarily forced the police away.

Back to our commuting headaches:

-          Traffic congestion

-          Construction workers who forget to pick up the cones from the overnight shift and take the 3 lane freeway down to 2 for morning rush hour

-          Ice spikes falling from the overhead bridge cables, destroying everything in their path

-  sign confusion

Let’s talk about sign confusion.

First up:

This sign is almost completely useless unless dated and timed. Traffic patterns are changing daily (if not more frequent), so I never did know if they were warning me about a new thing that happened last night, or reminding me of the change that happened last week (or month).

This got me into trouble once. The “new traffic pattern” actually WAS a “new traffic pattern” and I had to swerve into another lane to avoid taking an unwanted trip across the new toll bridge to Surrey.

These signs should have all said:

Next up:

Juggling baby pogo-sticking in the Ocean?? Ok, I’ll beware of those.

And my personal favourite. I had to draw it because I’m sure it’s the only one of its kind:

When you are trying to merge onto the freeway, this sign at the start of the freeway entrance holds a lot of information to digest in a short amount of time. Especially since by the time you SEE it, you’ve already committed to a lane. Also, this sign was put up several months before this traffic pattern was actually true. It should have been this at first:

The orange dots above are construction cones, aka, freeway chicken pox (This construction project made me hate the colour orange in the same way Superstore made me hate yellow).

However, I was not seeing red on the drive in this morning! Most of the bad memories of crazy construction traffic melted away as I flew down the freeway without even as much as tapping the breaks! I think some of my grey hairs even turned back to brown!

While I was on the freeway, I didn’t even change lanes. This is notable for a few reasons:

1. I didn’t even ONCE have to merge with another lane, even though I entered and exited the freeway legally!

2. The traffic moved fast enough for me to not have to PASS anyone!

I got to work so early that I didn’t have to run in my heels to get to my office! Granted, the week before Christmas there is usually less traffic, but I did leave for work 10 minutes later than usual (thanks to that blasted Elf on the Shelf that I forgot to set up last night). I may even be able to get up later than 5:10 from now on! I’ll be less tired and cranky, and for that, my husband and kids thank you too.

So to Kiewit for all your hard work, and to the Province of BC tax payers for funding this project, MERRY CHRISTMAS, and thank-you.