I've got a five-speed. Not a five-speed vehicle, a five-speed reaction. I think I'm in fifth gear now, which is acceptance.
But I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time. In fact, it wouldn't be the first time I was wrong about gridlock.
I thought last spring was a reasonable example of what to expect in traffic on my way to Walnut Creek.
I was wrong.
It goes back to mid-August, when normally slow morning traffic along Interstate 680 (and I-80, as well) got even slower. And slower. My drive, which takes 40 minutes with light traffic (almost always the situation when I come home in the afternoon), took about 50 minutes in the morning for months and months. And months.
In mid-August, it jumped to 70 or 80 minutes. And not just for me. There are four other Fairfield-Suisun City-Vacaville residents at my office, and all were shocked.
Our first reaction was simple: We told each other that it was a coincidence. There must have been an accident. School was starting. Once we got a couple of weeks into the academic year, parents would get off the road and it would go back to the way it was all last year – heavy traffic, but tolerable.
We knew it wasn't really a permanent change.
We were in denial.
As late-August arrived and things didn't change, denial gave way to anger.
"This is stupid!" I said several mornings after arriving late. "It's ridiculous. Weren't these people driving their children to school last year? How could it make this much difference?"
We complained about construction and bad drivers and inexplicable slowdowns. It was absurd. It didn't make sense!
We were angry.
By the time Labor Day passed, most of us began to think this might be a permanent change. We began to look for ways to navigate it.
"I would be willing to accept more traffic on Friday (when there's typically little traffic) in exchange for fewer drivers the rest of the week," I proclaimed.
We also began to look for alternate ways to get to work, thinking that if we took side streets or came another way (would going to Vallejo, then taking I-780 to the Benicia Bridge make sense?), it would be better. We would give up something – almost anything – in exchange for a shorter commute.
We were bargaining.
By mid-September, nothing changed. Maybe this wasn't a start-of-school event. Maybe this wasn't going to go away. Maybe this was the new normal – that it would take us 80 minutes to get to work, 40 minutes to drive home. Maybe we would be stuck in stop-and-go traffic before the Benicia Bridge day after day, month after month.
Our conversations about traffic were punctuated with sighs and groans. I told one co-worker that pretty soon, we'd have to leave home Monday morning to get to work Tuesday. Then I sighed and walked back to my desk, looking down, shoulders slumped.
It was depression.
Finally, we got to October and realized this: It isn't changing. Last year isn't coming back. We won't breeze through traffic and get to work before 8 a.m., unless we leave Fairfield-Suisun City at 4:30 a.m.
There's no use complaining, no use being mad, no use being sad. It takes more than an hour to get to work. That's how it is.
We reached acceptance, although there were still flashes of anger, bargaining and depression.
Especially anger.
But there was one day last week when traffic moved better. It only took an hour.
Is it possible things could go back to what they were before?
Or is that denial?
Brad Stanhope is a former Daily Republic editor. Reach him at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.
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