The municipal authorities are fixing the road at both entrances to our campus. Gigantic traffic jams are created as a result. People miss exams, presentations, and meetings. What’s even worse, they get home 40 minutes later than usual after class or work.
This has been going on since last week. Traffic delays get worse when we have visitors on campus, like we did on Friday when 600 prospective students and family members arrived. And then tried to leave through the same jammed road.
I haven’t been in one of these traffic jams, though. Not even once.
You know why?
There’s a road that goes parallel to the one being fixed. It’s wide open and completely traffic-free. I take it instead of the usual one and avoid the congestion. That parallel road is visible from the jammed one.
You can see it.
With eyes.
It’s right there.
Still, people keep congregating in the traffic-jammed road. There’s an easy, obvious alternative (and it’s actually one of several) but they aren’t taking the alternative paths because it’s not what they usually do.
There’s nothing a human brain dislikes more than newness. People would suffer great discomfort before looking for a new solution. The usual is pleasing. The different is painful. That’s how human brain works.
Clarissa's Blog 
. o O ( speedrun any% your campus )
🙂
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“leading sheep to slaughter…..”
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at my undergrad we had a similar setup, and most of us were commuters. We had one very busy main road always full of traffic and stoplights. There was a road that ran parallel to it with zero traffic lights, no traffic. both roads would lead to the highway and drop you off at the same exact spot. Nobody I met ever used that road, until i would show them it. I loved my little shortcut.
i went back last year to the are for the first time in well over a decad. Both streets were full of dreadful traffic and a stoplight or two had been added to the old shortcut. Im guessing the rise of GPS and Google Maps have changed things. I’m surprised that’s not the case in your neck of the woods!
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Weirdly, college campuses (and military bases) are sometimes exempt from Google maps– and that may be why nobody is taking Clarissa’s road. Our local college campus is non-GPS-able. I have dropped a student off there before, and we’ve been trying to work out how to get access to their library, and we have to do it the old-school way– either the student has to tell me where to turn and then retrace my steps until I’m back at the highway, or I have to print out a campus map before I go. These days, people don’t trust it *until* their GPS tells them, and if their GPS doesn’t know… it doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, the street we live on is a dead-end: there’s a cross-street in front of our house, and several times a day, we watch people come up our street, get to our house, realize it’s not a through street, and then go through various two- and three- point turns to go back the way they came from. The most reasonable explanation here is that at least one brand of GPS is listing ours as a through street.
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Exactly. People don’t trust what their eyes show them unless they can see it on a screen. That’s why Dylan Mulvaney can pass himself off as s woman.
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