How to beat the traffic jams

I’m not sure whether you’ve noticed, but petrol’s getting rather expensive these days. At this rate, by the end of the year, a full tank will be worth more than my apartment.

October is worse than toast always landing on the buttered side, than paper cuts, than toe stubs, and even worse than wardens- Kristina Chetcuti

So, last month, as part of a belt-tightening scheme, I embarked on a hypermiling campaign. Hypermiling, for the uninitiated, is the act of driving using techniques that maximise fuel economy.

Basically, it means I spent the whole of September cruising down gradients in neutral, slinking up to traffic lights, never using the brakes, and banning anyone from opening a window, even if it meant profuse sweating, fainting and so on.

After all, all is fair in love and a 50 per cent saving on fuel.

Actually, I now have a feeling some of the tactics might be illegal, so you may want to let your eyes glaze over the paragraph above, but my point is that thanks to these, ahem, tricks, my piggy bank was getting fatter.

Alas, come October, all my strategies and my Excel sheets dotted with figures and formulas which predicted enough dosh to get us a holiday in the Caribbean, came abruptly to an end.

As we all know, October is the candidate for the world’s worst thing ever. It’s worse than toast always landing on the buttered side, than paper cuts, than toe stubs, and even worse than wardens. October is the month when swarms of cars come crawling out of their summer hide-out: and they all hit the road at 7 a.m.

It’s like a mass meeting (of the 1980s sort, not a 2011 one) of cars on all the main road arteries. It also means that at the sighting of a nice, long, freeloader hill, I can no longer tell my daughter to hold on and pretend we’re on a roller coaster – the brakes are on again, out of fear of bumping into some 4x4 belonging to parents who send their children to the same school.

Let’s face it, such scenario would require lots of tongue-biting, and polite smiling and generally pretending that, why, a smashed bumper is but a mere dent. For all I know their daughter might be sitting next to mine on the school bench.

For this reason, it’s bye-bye hypermiling, and hello traffic crawling.

I’m not sure if ‘crawl’ is the appropriate word. Perhaps dragging-oneself-along-like-one-would-when- one-has-a-fatal-wound is more like it.

The other day, it took me 90 minutes to get from Paola to Mġarr: the duration of a whole football game.

Since the airport way is closed indefinitely (road maintenance, we’re informed: I am not too sure about that, so far, they’re at the uprooting-a-tree-per-day-and-then-cuppa stage), I have to do the grand tour of villages: Tarxien-Gudja-Kirkop-Qrendi-Siġġiewi-Rabat-Mġarr.

An hour-and-a-half, for something which in summer takes a mere 20 minutes. I tell you, by the time we get to school, I am desperate for a pee: but I can’t very well do so in little nursery loos which reach up to my ankles, can I?

So with my bowels and my sanity threatened, I had no choice but to stomp home and Google furiously for advice on how to beat the traffic. This is what I got:

1. Map out some alternative routes and try them. Check. Failed miserably, see above.

2. Play with your timing, and leave earlier or later to avoid congestions. Check. Am now seriously considering leaving the house at 5 a.m.

3. Check traffic reports before you leave. Check. But no alternative routes, anyway (see point 1).

4. Get traffic updates on your phone. Check. Also got me a ticket from a warden hiding behind a bush en route.

5. Use public transport. Titter.

6. Ditch the car altogether. Now, I am seriously contemplating this. In China, a wealthy businessman has become so fed up with the snail’s pace of the traffic in his city that he has taken to riding his horse to get to work.

His commute had been cut from 40 to 20 minutes. Taking to the saddle has many advantages, he told a newspaper: “It keeps me fit, has low carbon dioxide emissions, avoids traffic jams, parking fines, and speeding tickets.”

That’s it, I’m booking horse-riding lessons, but meanwhile, I’ll act on the next point.

7. Move. This might be the best solution of all. I will no longer be part of the nation’s morning woes, traffic will no longer be my commuting bane, for I have decided to go for the zen option. I am borrowing a camper van, spray a peace sign and flowers on it, and park it in a field close by my daughter’s school.

While everyone’s stuck in traffic, I’ll be in dreadlocks singing Kumbaya round the camp fire. Two minutes to the bell-ring, we’ll jump over the rubble wall, and voilà, first in line for assembly. Fuel cost: nil.

krischetcuti@gmail.com