STRANGER THAN FICTION: LIVING IN TRAFFIC HELL DRIVING THE BYWAYS OF SOUTH FLORIDA

I'm living in traffic hell.

Used to be, Broadway and Kingshighway were my biggest pains, traffic-wise.

Navigating around Jackson at 8 a.m. or 5 p.m. was nightmarish.

And the McDonald's on Broadway? I really had to want those McNuggets to attempt getting in and out of that drive-through. (Of course, I DID really want them. Plus a shake and fries.)

I begged the mayor to make Broadway a one-way street again. Sure, the prospect of one-way traffic seemed big-city like and a little intimidating but, deep down, I knew it would make things better. I'd no longer have to glare at the fun-loving college commuters boldly using my personal path to the office.

But a little time and distance really changes a person's perspective.

You Southeast Missouri State University students, go ahead and cruise Broadway. And you Jackson dwellers, relax and enjoy the wasted minutes spent sitting through a couple of light changes on Kingshighway.

Because, unless you've been to South Florida, you don't know what traffic is. Even St. Louis and Memphis don't have anything like it.

I think the biggest problem is there are only two decent north-and-south routes directly connecting West Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami: Interstate 95 and Florida's Turnpike.

The turnpike is virtually devoid of traffic because the brainiac drivers around here don't believe the old adage that time is money. They'd rather sit on Interstate 95 for an hour than pay a lousy buck to take the turnpike.

Another problem is nearly all the drivers here are from New York, New Jersey, Cuba, Haiti or Jamaica. Midwestern natives, known for our motoring prowess, make up roughly .00000001 percent of the driving population. Everyone else is pretty much either observing the traffic laws of their native countries or observing none at all.

And then you have the plain old nuts.

The perfect example of a typical South Florida traffic situation occurred two weeks ago, when a man distraught over his home life decided to improve matters by sitting along Interstate 95 with a gun to his head. Don't worry, this story has a happy ending.

The police couldn't really allow normal people with jobs to cruise past the guy, so they shut off both lanes at the height of rush hour.

This sort of event is so common that when I made a work-related call to the sheriff's office that morning, an employee calmly told me the man I needed to speak with wasn't there. "Joe's on the scene of a threatened suicide situation along Interstate 95," he said. "We've got both lanes of traffic shut down." "How awful!" I said, meaning the suicide situation.

"I know," the employee said, "but the traffic is bound to get moving again once the guy tires out or something." The happy ending was that a local grocery chain donated several 18-wheelers to be parked as buffers between the troubled gun owner and the interstate, the traffic started moving, and the gun owner DID tire out and was directed to inpatient therapy.

Total driving time lost: Two hours.

I wasn't involved in that incident, but I have seen some driving maneuvers that I've named and will attempt to describe:

1. The Peripheral Visionless Lane Change. Drivers here either are completely impervious to the fact that there are cars in the lanes next to theirs or have no peripheral vision whatsoever. They will make sudden lane changes without signaling or recognizing that a vehicle already occupies the next lane.

2. The Defiant Road Crossing. This one doesn't so much involve drivers as pedestrians. They have no respect for don't-walk signals or crosswalks and will step out onto the asphalt at any time in any place.

The frequent newspaper accounts of the typical outcomes don't seem to discourage them at all.

3. The Hell-No-You-Can't-Pass Acceleration. Drivers here have a psychotic obsession with staying in front of their fellow motorists. Out of six lanes of traffic, they will elect to go 40 mph in yours. When you try to get around them, they speed up and get in front of you in a second lane, a third lane, and so on, always slowing down after a successful block.

4. The Invisible Red Light. Traffic signals mean absolutely nothing to these people. I've seen four cars, yes, FOUR CARS continue to make left turns after the left turn signal has changed to red. Of course, the oncoming traffic has no intention of letting the turn-makers get away with it, so they "punish" them by broadsiding their new Jaguars.

5. The Stop-n-Gawk. Every single accident or engine problem causes a slowdown, whether it's actually blocking traffic or not. Seriously, if two pigeons collided midair and fell to the ground on the side of I-95, people would slow down to look at the mangled birds.

I'm beginning to believe the radio stations are playing the same two traffic reports every day one for morning and one for evening. The same accidents happen, the same roadways are blocked, the same commuters arrive for work an hour late.

Maybe there's an upside to that last part, though. Imagine telling your boss you're an hour late because traffic was backed up on Kingshighway.

Heidi Nieland is a former Southeast Missourian staff writing now living in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. She can be reached at newsduo@herald.infi.net.