The problem is not the problem

A bridge I drive over regularly has been under construction for the better part of a decade. One lane closed, then the next, then two lanes at a time. On and on the construction dragged, until it seemed that the bridge was doomed to perpetual roadwork. And so every time the road would back up with traffic, we blamed the roadwork, blamed the bureaucracy, blamed what we perceived as incompetence or mismanagement of resources or whatever buzzword of the day came to mind to explain the decade-long boondoggle.

Then a few weeks ago, the bridge opened up. First one lane, then the next, with black asphalt and sharp paint dividing the lanes. At last the decade of construction has come to a close.

The traffic has not cleared up at all.

There’s a side road that feeds into this more major road two blocks before the bridge, a two-lane road with more traffic than you’d expect. It needs a red light, or at least that’s my new prescription, as I realize that it’s the cause of the traffic more than the construction ever was. The main road still backs up, more or less the same as before, only now it clears up once you’re past that artery and it’s smooth sailing over the bridge. And I can’t help but feel that we placed the blame on the obvious problem, on the ongoing construction and what we perceived as the worst of bureaucracy and problems that drive on forever, when the real problem was there in plain sight.

Now I have to wonder if a red light was added to the feeder road that now is the apparent traffic problem, would the traffic actually clear up? Would our commute times go down, or would we just trade a traffic slow down for a red light slow down? Or would we discover another bottleneck somewhere else along the road, something else to continue to remind us that we are the traffic, that the true problem lies at an entirely different spot than what we perceived?

It was easier to have the bridge to blame. A scapegoat for what’s likely due to city planning or the a lack thereof, to a booming population, to the very things that attracted us to the area in the first place.

I think that applies to more of life than is at first apparent.

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