Traffic Woes

I left the office late, around 6:00, and proceeded to hit crazy amounts of traffic. Everyone was moving along the Corniche at a snail's pace. I didn't know what was up so I checked twitter and the twitterverse was complaining about the traffic all over Doha. It appears that something was up and things were far worse than usual. So after taking about 20 minutes to go 500m I did something I've never done before -- parked my car in a parking space on the side of the road and walked to the Costa Café on the Corniche to have a meal there and wait out the chaos. Figured there was no point of just sitting in traffic, at the rate the traffic was moving it was going to take over an hour to get home.

An hour later traffic looked better so I went on my way, only to hit the traffic jam about 800m down the road! It still took me over 20 minutes to get home from there.

What frightens me the most is that traffic is just going to get worse over the next two years. There's not much that can be done about it in the near-term, it's not like the Government doesn't know the traffic has gotten worse. Any solutions (the metro, more and wider roads) will take time to implement. There's no quick fix.

But if it's going to get like this every evening I'm going to have to have a rethink of either my working hours or where I’m living. An hour back from the office every day, on a commute that used to take 20 minutes, is just not on.