// November 21st, 2006 // 14 Comments » // Information, me
Since I’ve been away from the university for a couple of months I never used the highway early in the morning (since I graduated last June). Now, that I have become a TA in the university I use the highway every morning. I forgot how crowded it could be. It took me about 30 minutes just to go between 2 exits (less than 5 kilometers).
If there is one thing that I hate it’s negativity, some people just like to talk about the negatives in everything they see for the sake of complaining. These people sometimes criticize a certain behavior or action, just to tell people indirectly that they don’t have these flaws and that they are simply perfect!! It’s easy to find flaws and complain about the bad job others are doing, but what we need are solutions and ways to solve these problems.
I thought I would write down a few suggestions that might solve this problem, and if you have any better idea just write them down as comments to this post.
- One thing you might notice when driving on the highway in the morning, is about 90% or more of the cars only have one person riding. Which means that almost all people go to work alone in their own cars. A few days ago I decided to count the number of sedans with 3 people, and I only found about 6 cars.
Imagine what it would be like if every car had 3 people riding instead of just one person. That would logically lead to a decrease in the number of cars on the highway by one third!! One of my classmates and best friends lived about 2 kilometers away from my house and my house was on his way to the university, and never thought of carpooling (i’m not saying that it’s a good thing).
So, carpooling frees the highways so you can get to work on time, and it saves you gas money since you don’t use your car everyday.
- One of the reasons why the traffic is so high in the morning, is that everyone uses their own car to get to work. Why do people use their own cars to get to work? well, because we don’t have public transportation. Yes, we don’t have trains and we don’t have buses that have an organized daily route.
Ok, now lets see. How many students go to King saud university? How many student go to Imam university? thats more than 30000 students!! Which means more than 20000 student use the own cars on highway to get their colleges everyday (assuming that some may carpool). So why not have official bus routes that can pass by every exit on the highway every 20 minutes?
So, using public transportation frees the highway, saves gas money, and makes transportation companies alot of profit!!
- When I used to be in the states, I remember that the number of lanes on each side of the road would change depending on what time of day it is. The would be a huge truck that would move the cement barriers between the 2 sides of the road to make the side entering washington with more lanes than the other side. And at 12:00 I guess the truck moves the barriers to make the side leaving washington with more lanes.
It makes me really angry to see one side of the road is full while the other side is virtually empty. I’m not saying make the entire highway with movable cement barriers. It’s enough to do it between exits that have very high traffic.
It’s cleave, easy to implement, and its helps solve the problem.
- They have done a very great job solving the traffic problems at exits 9, 10, 15, and 16. I just hope that they will find a solution to the traffic on the highway as soon as possible.
These were a few of the ideas I though of to solve the traffic problem. If you have any suggestion add comment…
