Wind in your hair, music blaring on the stereo and the freeway is moving at normal speeds and you hope that you can make the drive without incident, then, bam – “out of the blue”, you’re slamming on your breaks, shifting into low gear and praying or swearing that you can get the car to slow down from a speed in excess of 65 miles per hour to a crawl of less than 10 mph. This slow crawl can go on for miles and eats into all of your drive time.
Driving the freeways all over Southern California we become so inconvenienced by slow traffic that we say “this better be good,” meaning there better be a reason at the end of this slow traffic possibly a car accident or an animals crossing the street. However, the slow down in traffic is usually the result of nothing, except the domino effect. The “Domino Effect” happens when cars put on their brakes to slow down for no reason other than they feel that they are driving to fast, obviously, they’ve never heard of taking their foot off the gas pedal, and this will send the brake lights shining for miles.
Lost time in traffic is a fact of driving the freeways in Southern California. That’s why we judge our destinations in time rather than miles, because a distance of 70 miles could take hours to complete with congested traffic.
Have you ever experience the Domino Traffic Effect in Southern California or elsewhere?
