Traffic (Or The Increasing Mess On The Mileiha Road)

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Only a charlatan would post about the weather or traffic.

It goes something like this. The construction of Sharjah's new 'middle road' linking the city centre to the Mileiha road has allowed the morning traffic to flow out to the 611 (neologistically The Emirates Road) and the evening traffic to flow back. There's just one teensy weensy problemette here, in that whatever genius conceived said road decided the conjoining of the two should be a traffic light rather than a 'clover leaf' exchange. The result has been that as an increasing number of commuters have discovered the shortcut, the traffic has backed up at the light more each morning.

The Anjads used to rock up and turn the lights off, which worked handsomely, but now they've stopped. And so the traffic has found other ways out to the 611, further up the airport/Dhaid road and turning at the University or the road down through the residential areas to the Sharjah Inland Container Terminal.

The result has been to spread the increasing chaos. The pressure of the roadworks on the Emirates road has meant more drivers are willing to go to greater lengths to try and get out to the 611. In short, it's not pretty.

It's like watching sand pouring through marbles. This route blocks up, that route gets busy. That one blocks up, the other one gets busy. There's simply too much traffic trying to find its way through too small a ratrun - and it's growing noticeably busier out there.

You can do traffic studies until you go blue in the face, but the situation you're studying is constantly fluid and subject to massive change in the next few months. When the National Paints remediation is finished we'll finally see if it is enough - or too little, too late. It'll take a few weeks for things to settle down and a complete picture emerge as word gets around and the traffic patterns shift as a consequence.

I can only hope it does, because we travel on the Mileiha Road to Sarah's school every day and it's starting to look ugly every which way. And I'm talking 06.15am here, not 'rush hour'...