Traffic

Talking to the guys at Coda (on the course) it seems that my stress-out experience with traffic is actually quite common. It's not unusual to take 4 hours to go 85 miles here in the Midlands, and accidents, fog, general congestion all compound that. Route-switching is needed quite often, and the A-roads clog very quickly. Sounds like traffic densities in some areas have reached the 'knee of the curve' - a fundamental of queuing theory - waiting time goes up quite linearly with increasing desnity until around 70% of capacity is reached. Then, quite suddenly, waiting times go through the roof. That certainly explains things here. Flying is very expensive, so the usual NZ city-hop is not on, and trains while great on the main city routes, can be sporadic elsewhere. Hard to get in and out of some cities and do a day's work. So driving it has to be, and they (other consultants) generally hate it. They are amazed that in NZ it's possible to average 90kph start to stop in most parts of the country. We don't know how lucky....