As I was sitting in yet another of the many traffic jams that clog this city’s streets on any given day, at any given moment, I turned on my radio. What I heard was what any driver-who-is-stuck-in-a-traffic-jam-on- a-daily-basis hears: a little music, a little talk and a lot of traffic updates!
Virtually every radio station, it seems, feels the need to report on the traffic every 3 1/2 minutes. Frankly, I don’t see the point, because the traffic in this city always stinks!
It stinks in the morning, it stinks in the evening, it stinks because of “rush hour,” it stinks because of “reverse rush hour,” it stinks leaving the state on Friday, it stinks coming back on Sunday, it stinks because of the weather, it stinks because of construction, it stinks because of an accident, it stinks at the toll booths, it stinks in the suburbs. . . . If, for some reason, you catch a time when the traffic doesn’t stink, it is probably because you are lost and have gone the wrong way.
I would like to recommend that radio stations not put a guy “high atop the Sears Tower” or in a “News Channel Jet-Copter” to report on traffic conditions that are so obviously and so regularly poor. They are only wasting their time. The traffic will never get better, whether they tell us about it or not. What they could do, however, is consider hiring out the “Jet-Copter” to people like me. Charge us a few bucks, give us a two-way radio and show us where to find all the great shortcuts!
Now that would be a traffic update I could live with.
