Gridlock

by Ben Elton

  'Can't we go any faster?' said Toss.

  'Sure, Toss, sure,' snapped Deborah. 'I'll just drive right under this truck in front of us, shall I?' Of course, if they had been in a movie she could have done, or perhaps instead, she would have driven through a fruit market, scattering fruit everywhere but curiously injuring no-one. Or she could have simply screeched across into the other lane and woven her way forward through the bumper-to-bumper opposing traffic, causing police motorcyclists to fall off in dramatic slides, then get up and scratch their heads.

  Deborah, of course, could do none of those things, she could just sit and edge her way forward like everyone else. Back up the line, Sam Turk was in the same position, and was suffering a terrible car dilemma. Should he jump out and run up the queue on foot, and, if so, would the traffic instantly leap forward at speed, thus allowing Deborah to disappear into the distance? This dilemma is similar to another classic taxi dilemma, that which consumes every taxi passenger at the point at which they enter the last traffic jam of their journey, perhaps only 200 yards from their destination. The gruesome question is, will the wait be a short one, or a long one? Would it be quicker to sit it out or pay the cabbie off and leg it? Sadly, it has been decreed that the traffic will only leap forward if the passenger leaves the cab. If he stays put, the last 150 yards will take 25 minutes.

  'I can't believe this traffic' said Sam.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  NIGHTMARE

  Actually, the traffic was heavy even by London standards, and Toss and Sam were not the only people who could not believe it.

  Chief Superintendent Barry Ross was staring at his great big flashing map, the source of so many of his grey hairs, and wondering why God hated him the way he clearly did.

  Just two hours before, Ross had been a reasonably contented, if rather sad, policeman. The morning traffic had just about made it in and found somewhere to park, there had been the usual ulcer-growing half hour between eight and eight-thirty when it really did seem to Ross as if it simply would not be possible to squeeze any more cars into London – he felt that way every morning, and somehow the miracle was always achieved.

  'They get there in the end, Janine,' he would say wearily to the policewoman who brought him his morning tea. 'Late, furious, double-parked and worrying about their paintwork, but they get there.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Janine.

  'Apart from the casualties,' Ross continued, 'they won't get there, no I'm afraid not, they won't get there at all. Not with their mangled limbs and suchlike, and their massive internal bleeding and their being just plain, old-fashioned dead. They won't get to work at all, will they? And it's my poor lads as has to scrape them off the bonnets and get their heads out of the steering wheels, what's more.'

  'Yes, sir,' said Janine, feeling a bit sick. She liked Ross, but hated it when he got morbid, which he often did, because years of being the grand orchestrator of London's single most effective killing machine had sucked the happiness out of Ross. He had become grimly familiar with death, he had forgotten the social reserve which most of us apply to the subject. Ross and his wife were seldom invited out to dinner any more because of Ross's unfortunate habit of remarking that the meat course reminded him of something his boys had hosed off the Old Kent Road that morning.

  'Natural wastage, Janine, my dear, natural wastage,' Ross mused. 'The toll may be terrible, but it has been decreed acceptable by those who know about these things. We may thank our stars, Janine, that it is not you or I who are called upon to quantify an acceptable death toll. Ours not to reason why, ours but to cut them out of the bodywork.' Ross took a thoughtful sip of tea.

  'Do you know that the United States of America loses nearly as many citizens each year on the roads as it lost in the entire Vietnam War?'

  Janine did know, because Chief Superintendent Ross often told her this type of fact. She knew the accident frequency on almost every junction in the city, which was why she found it hard to sleep at night. Janine's mother wished that Janine would go and work in a nice flower shop or something.

  'Funny that, isn't it?' continued Ross, reflecting on his Vietnam statistic. 'You'd have thought there'd be more fuss.'

  'I suppose people don't fuss, sir, because they think it's worth it,' replied Janine. 'They prefer driving their cars to fighting the Vietnam War.'

  'Don't let this job make you hard, Janine,' said Ross, reprovingly. 'Don't let it sap your humanity.'

  About nine-thirty Chief Superintendent Ross pulled himself out of his reverie and went for a final ride in the chopper, surveying for the last time the vast mess over which he had presided.

  'Quart in a pint bottle,' he murmured to himself, as he often did when contemplating the M4 as it poured cars endlessly into West London.

  'Quart in a pint bottle.'

  The helicopter flew along the still chock-a-block motorway, with its queues still reaching back towards Heathrow. They followed the near-stationary line of traffic through Hammersmith and South Kensington and up to Hyde Park Corner, and that was when they saw it. Ross's nightmare, the heart of the gridlock.

  'God help us,' whispered Ross.

  'You must be joking,' God whispered back.

  An articulated lorry containing drums of corrosive liquid had jackknifed whilst trying to turn into Constitution Hill, somehow it had lost part of its load. A couple of cars had been damaged by falling drums and there was a serious spill steaming and bubbling on the tarmac. The incident was perhaps forty-five seconds old, the driver of the lorry had not even got out of his cab yet, but already cars were backing up.

  'Oh please, not today, please,' murmured Ross, but as God had just pointed out, it was too late for prayers. Before his very eyes, Ross could see the traffic pouring into the jam. He watched as the lines feeding back along Park Lane, Knightsbridge and Piccadilly began to freeze. Ross could actually see the movement draining out of the roads beneath.

  Ross did not yet know that he had just watched the birth of a gridlock, but he knew that the situation was serious. He grabbed the radio.

  'Hyde Park Corner is out, repeat out, minimum four hours. Stranded artic, looks like corrosives.'

  Ross needed to give no more instructions, his team had rehearsed their techniques and plans so many times. They had a damage control exercise worked out for every possible crash in London. Ross knew that seconds after he had informed the centre, patrol cars would begin to attempt to divert traffic away from the stricken area, the BBC and commercial stations would be informed and the fire and ambulance services would attempt to pick their way up to the scene of the crash. Ross knew that all these things would be happening, he also knew that it was like putting a sticking plaster on a shotgun wound. This one stupid accident would screw up traffic in London all day, there would be long delays and huge inconvenience, it simply could not be avoided.

  'Let's go home and get a cup of tea,' said Ross wearily.

  'Nice retirement pressie, eh, Chief?' said the pilot. 'Block on the corner couldn't really be worse, could it?' But of course it could, as they would soon find out.

  THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA

  Down on the ground, in the frozen tentacles of the stricken intersection, countless human dramas were unfurling. Every car contained its degree of frustration, but some burned more agonizingly than others. The bride in the hired Daimler was assured by her father that it would be all right. He was wrong, it wouldn't be, and the embittered groom would later get drunk and, in a foolish attempt to hang his silk wedding boxer shorts on top of the church steeple, would fall and break his neck. Behind the Daimler was a fellow in a BMW who was rushing to meet a very important foreign client at Heathrow. His failure to do so put a black mark on his career ('You should have set off earlier') which led him three years later to drive that same BMW off Beachy Head. Nearby across the countless smaller problems was a Mini in which was contained a beating heart, a beating heart that a small child lay waiting for in Great Ormond Street Hospital. That heart was destined to b
eat its last right there at the throbbing epicentre of the gridlock. Beeping its horn at the Mini with the heart, was an Escort van containing a plumber on his way to deal with a burst that would now sadly destroy the entire lifetime's possessions of an elderly widow. Behind the Escort, also beeping its horn, was a Mercedes containing three robbers who had just done a jewellery store near Harrods.

  People's jobs, people's health, people's love affairs, people's futures were frozen in the traffic, and a great lament rose above the smoke and the growling engines, wailing in sorrow for the losses of the day. It was the hooters' chorus. In the British driving test one is informed quite clearly what the car hooter is there for, it is there to inform other road users of your presence. Well if that was what people were using their horn for around Hyde Park Corner on the day of the gridlock, then they were wasting their time, everybody already knew everybody else was there, that was why no-one could get anywhere. The truth is, of course, that, in the drama of the moment, people were forgetting the Highway Code and were not using their horns to say 'I am here' but were using them to say 'Why am I here?'

  Horns serve no practical purpose: they are there to alleviate personal frustration and to insult and annoy other road users. Their only real use, the one defined in the driving test as 'announcing your presence', is rendered completely useless by the fact that they are used so often to say 'fuck off' that that is the only message which other people hear. Horns are like alarm bells: one hears so many of them that it never crosses anyone's mind to take any notice of them.

  DREADFUL COINCIDENCE

  When Chief Superintendent Ross arrived back at his command centre, Janine had a cup of tea ready for him.

  'This is an unexpected treat, Janine,' said Ross. 'You don't normally bring me a second cup until elevenses. Is this a retirement present?'

  'Oh no, sir, that's later, we've had a whip-round—' Janine stopped short, Gloria was glaring at her. Gloria was the girl in Traffic Control with the 'You don't have to be mad to work here but it helps' sticker on her computer. She had organized a presentation for later and was anxious that Janine should not give it away.

  'No, sir,' continued Janine, 'I just thought you might need a pick-me-up. There's a huge bomb scare at Holborn Circus, sir.'

  'Oh dear,' said Ross, trying to disguise how deeply shaken he was. This was another classic accident scenario location, a major junction right in the financial district. 'I suppose traffic's backing up over the river?'

  'It's got as far south as Lambeth, sir, and it's spreading back west, down the river to Waterloo.'

  Ross sipped his tea.

  'Have you sugared this, Janine?' he enquired.

  'Oh yes, sir, three as usual,' she replied.

  'Funny,' said Ross, 'it tastes bitter.' And well it might, for Ross knew that with the Corner and Holborn Circus blocked out, there would be paralysis through the West End to the City. What a way to leave. 'You heard about old Barry,' they would say in years to come. 'London's top traffic man couldn't even get home on his last day.' Ross gripped his mug tightly, deliberately allowing it to burn his hand a little so that his whirling senses might have something to fix upon. Janine was still standing before him. He looked at her enquiringly.

  'Is there something else, Janine?' he enquired.

  'Yes,' she said, in a nervous squeak. 'A load of ball bearings has come off a French lorry at the top of the Marylebone Road underpass, and a tall coach has got itself wedged at Blackwall, and—'

  Ross raised his hand to silence Janine. He gently put down his teacup and went over to the big flashing board, the board which had been his ball and chain for so many years, and was now his executioner. The big board was flashing away like a panic full of perverts.

  'Well?' he asked.

  'We're trying to contain it, sir,' said a sergeant. 'It's just there's so much traffic feeding in we can't cut it all off and so the crisis area keeps expanding.' Ross could actually watch the jam grow as new light trails snaked across the map. 'Our cars are getting blocked in as we try to turn traffic away,' the sergeant continued. 'I'm afraid this one's really come to life, sir.'

  'Four crucially positioned accidents inside an hour,' said Ross. 'There is no God.'

  And God replied, 'Not in peak traffic there ain't, mate.'

  THE SHIVERING SNAKE

  It was exactly an hour later that Deborah and Toss began their getaway. Central London was completely paralysed. Every escape route ended in a jam and hence became a jam itself. From the moment Ross understood the extent of his ill fortune in being presented with four crucials in one morning, he could have taken a pencil and a London streetfinder and charted the inevitable growth of the super-jam across the entire length and breadth of London. In fact, this is exactly what he did. It was a pointless exercise of course, rather like the captured Christians of Ancient Rome drawing up a detailed rota as to the order in which they would be fed to the lions, but there was little else for Ross to do. The puny defence and control initiatives which he had planned for circumstances such as these were all in place, his officers stood bravely on the expanding edges of the grid vainly attempting to staunch the never-ending feast of cars that flowed in to feed the monster's insatiable appetite, and there was nothing Ross himself could do. All morning he sat at his desk fiddling with his coloured pencils, mapping out the growth of his nightmare, struggling feebly to keep his predictions ahead of the terrible reality outside.

  'Dean Street and Old Compton should be solid within the next five minutes,' he would shout to people who already knew. 'That means Soho is completely locked now.'

  Then Ross would relapse into silence for a while, before shouting, 'I imagine Baker Street will be stationary by now, that means that Hyde Park and the Marylebone Road jams have officially linked.'

  Perhaps the process of charting the uncontrollable gave Ross the vaguest feeling of having some control over it. If it did he was kidding himself, traffic flow has a life of its own. Occasionally Ross would attempt a positive suggestion of some sort, just for the sake of form.

  'The Regent's Park ring road will be solid by now. Eventually people will take to the grass, phone the park authority to tell them to put guards on the flower-beds and warn the Zoo, maybe they could put cotton wool in the animals' ears or something.'

  Ross was right, out on the streets (and on the grass) the rules were getting stretched. It takes quite a lot of provocation for most people to start breaking laws, but some cars had already been stuck for nearly two hours, and that is quite a lot of provocation.

  It starts with a collectively shared paranoia that one is in the wrong lane, that the outside lane, or the inside lane, is moving whilst one's own lane is not. So, out goes an arm and a car attempts to switch lanes. Instantly the paranoias of a hundred other motorists are confirmed. 'So the other lane is moving faster,' and a hundred arms go out and the traffic, which is scarcely moving forward at all, attempts to make up for this by executing a pointless series of edging, bobs, slides and weaves, virtually on the spot. The effect, from the police helicopters above the turmoil, is that of a long, still snake, shivering in its sleep.

  TO BE YOUNG AND FREE

  The fruitlessness of the lane shiver, combined with the gut-wrenching tension of trying to physically drive through a taxi without scratching your paintwork, leads some of the more impetuous souls to delude themselves that the problem can be solved by more direct action.

  These poor dupes, suckled on a diet of motoring images of freedom and individual triumph, convinced by generations of car makers, oil men and politicians that the car is the ultimate symbol of individual liberty and self-expression, simply cannot believe that the car is also a terrible trap. A trap which, far from confirming the individual's splendid isolation and independence, condemns the individual to a dronelike conformity of movement, or, as is increasingly the case, paralysis. Far from celebrating the freedom of the individual, more and more the private car is becoming the ultimate leveller, reducing us all to a dull conform
ity – identically frustrated, identically furious, identically stuck.

  This hard truth is of course too much to bear for all the young Steve McQueens fuming in the jam. In their anger they decide to fight back. Surely that is what being a free individual is all about? Struggling for one's rights against impossible odds. Suddenly and completely irrationally they say, 'OK, fuck this, I'm getting out,' and with a satisfying roaring of gears drive straight up a cul-de-sac, or else, perceiving a modicum of movement in the oncoming traffic, start trying to force their way into it by attempting to execute an impossible three-point turn, thus bringing the opposite lane to a standstill as well.

  KNOCK-ON EFFECTS

  Back at the control centre, Ross was fielding endless furious calls from the emergency services, who were, of course, completely unable to service emergencies. Fires were left burning out of control, the ill and injured were left to die, there was even the beginnings of some looting as enterprising souls realized that the police were having to respond to calls on foot, and anyway they were completely tied up dealing with half a million purple-faced motorists. There were calls from big businesses and financial institutions, desperately enquiring when the paralysis would lift as commerce was impossible under these conditions. Eventually there came a call from the Prime Minister's Office.

  'What the hell is going on, Ross?' shouted Ingmar Bresslaw. The damned city's ground to a halt. The Prime Minister's trying to conduct Question Time and only six government MPs have managed to get to work! The only way we got the PM in was by police helicopter . . .'