Traffic jams - a Bank Holiday tradition we are stuck with

Getting stuck in traffic jams (congestion on Lendal Bridge anyone?) is the stuff of motoring nightmares, and apart from doing nothing to ease your blood pressure, they play straight into the hands of the travel tyrants who reckon we should go everywhere by public transport or push bike. Which is all very well if you have a public transport system that serves your needs enough for you to leave the car at home or not have one at all, but that’s another story…

Over the weekend, no doubt there were more than a few blowing a gasket on the A64 as holiday traffic crawled its way to Scarborough, the kids yowling in the back – are we there yet? – and the outer ring road will have had its fair share of snarl-ups and bad temper. Then today, there’s the mass exodus back from the coast, with the A64 being one long caravan of caravans as people head for home in readiness for home and school tomorrow…

But at least it won’t have been as bad as Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Apparently, every Friday night there sees a mass rush hour exodus that ends up with average tailbacks of 180km. That’s around 112 miles in old money, which is the equivalent of sitting in a traffic jam as long as the distance between York and Leicester. Imagine that! It makes getting enmeshed in congestion around York look like zipping round a racing circuit.

In Sao Paulo 112-mile long traffic jams are the norm. It’s like living in your car – people shave, put on their make-up, watch films, do their paperwork, pay their bills… one woman even met her husband in one.

But if Friday nights in Sao Paulo are regular snarl-up nights, think of being in a jam for a staggering 11 days. That’s what happened in Beijing when road building caused a 62-mile long business opportunity for food and drink vendors who made a fortune supplying hungry and thirsty drivers at massively inflated prices.

And back in 1990, the first Easter holiday after the fall of the Berlin Wall saw some 18 million cars stuck on the road as for the first time in 40 years families had the freedom to visit each other between east and west.

Time was when you got stuck in a snarl-up that you’d tell the kids to get out their I-Spy books. I thought they’d gone out with Etch-a-Sketch and John Bull printing outfits but apparently not – you can still get them, courtesy of the Michelin map people, and if you spy enough of whatever it is you want to spy about – on the motorway, at the seaside, car badges, dinosaurs (eh?) - to get 1,000 points you can get an I-Spy certificate to put on your bedroom wall. Somehow I don’t think the Snapchat-savvy kids of today will be too enthralled about that…

When we were kids we did do the I-Spy thing on a long car journey, even if we were distracted by our dad playing interminable Reginald-Dixon-At-The-Blackpool-Tower-Organ tunes on the car’s 8-track stereo cassette player at full blast.

We never got a look in with our music - ‘I’m not listening to your bloody rubbish,’ he’d say, which was exactly the in-our-heads sentiment that we’d have been clattered for if we’d repeated it back. And if we did dare to complain just a little bit, he’d blast us into submission with the fug from his pipe as he puffed on an ounce of Condor Ready Rubbed. Do that today and they’d call in Social Services. That said, he loved us really and we loved him. It’s just that we couldn’t stand Reginald Dixon playing on his organ….

But the best way to keep occupied in a traffic jam or long car journey is what my mum did when she was a slip of a lass some decades ago. She unravelled her straw hat. There she was, sitting on the back seat of the family’s little Austin 7 alongside her sister and two brothers when she found a stray bit and pulled. And kept pulling until the brim and gone and the only bit left was a little fez style thing perched on the top of her head.

That’s one heck of a way to tell your folks that you don’t like your Easter bonnet….