When you think about it, life is a series of ongoing, connecting trips.
Many of us start the day by commuting, or traveling to work. We drop off our children at school. We may visit the doctor or go to the market to buy food. We rush home to see our families.
Life is more pleasant when these trips are easy and direct. The easier commuting is, the higher your quality of life is.
People who live in big cities spend a lot of time talking about traffic. Too many people on the roads can be a big problem. Not all traffic is the same. There are some terms you need to know when talking about traffic.
One such term is gridlock. Gridlock is when nobody can go anywhere. The roads become one big parking lot. There is also stop-and-start traffic. This is when you move forward a little, but then stop. Move a little. Then stop. Both are equally stressful. Traffic can be bumper-to-bumper. This means there are so many cars on the road that their bumpers seem to be touching. To idle means the engine of your car is running, but you are not moving anywhere.
Another term to know is rush hour traffic. Rush hour traffic happens at about the same time every day— when people are commuting to and from work.
In China, Shanghai's traffic problems were found to be worse than Beijing's. Drivers in Shanghai spend 33 percent of their time on the road idling. People in Beijing spend 27 percent of their travel time idling, doing nothing but running their engines and wasting fuel.
So, what can cities do to reduce traffic problems? One thing cities can do is to supply more public transportation. Before cities with traffic problems find ways to get people from Point A to Point B more efficiently, they can only envy people in Tampere, Finland and Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. The survey found that these two cities have the fastest moving traffic.
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