Traffic.

[GoldOxide_imp]

I'm not sure if I'm the only one who's experiencing this here in Southern California, but wanted to see if it's the same in other parts of the country, or the world for that matter.

When the world shut down last year, road traffic became very light as people hunkered down and few people were going somewhere for a job each day.

Now, with the world seemingly back to a new normal, many people have remained working at home, or are not working at all. We had about 15 people working in our office each day, and now we've got six, with the remaining people able to work from home permanently. Also, about half of the commercial space around our office is still vacant.

However, road traffic on weekdays has returned to pre-pandemic level. Once again, I'm very happy to be able to ride a motorcycle to work, cutting half the time and all of the traffic. Here's me on the way to work this morning. Both the regular and car pool lanes are crawling on a Thursday morning.

Interestingly, while car and truck traffic have returned to normal, I hardly see any motorcycles on my daily commute now. Maybe one other bike every few days.

Am I the only one seeing this?

I think that might be difficult to measure accurately. For example, if you ride to work at the same time each day perhaps the roads are as full as they were before...I mean, full is full--once the hiway stretch you're on is saturated, it simply is. Traffic might crawl along at whatever slow speed just as you remember from before.

But...for how long? How long does that hiway saturation last? Perhaps before, the stretch you ride was saturated with traffic for a good 2.5 hours in the morning, let's say from 7am to 930am. But now, it may only be saturated for an hour an a half, from 730-9am. But if your commute is from 745-830, it seems as if traffic is the same as before--completely saturated during your 45 minute commute.

In reality, the saturation duration may be an hour less which means many fewer cars / vehicles on that stretch of the hiway.

I think that is a reasonable possibility. One would have to grab a thermos of coffee and park the CB1100 on top of a hill and watch traffic all morning.