This is how a traffic jam happens.
It all begins with the perpetrator pressing the brake pedal too hard. Behind him, caught unawares, the next driver presses his break pedal harder still to compensate for the unexpected heavy braking. This in turn triggers a wave of progressively harder braking until, some point several miles back, a traffic jam happens.
The perpetrator continues on his journey, completely oblivious to the frustration and – yes, let’s go there – pain caused by slow moving traffic as far as the eye can see. He is the silent assassin of your time. He must be caught, captured and ruthlessly murdered. His kind prevent astronauts from getting to the launch pad, his kind think it’s okay to turn up to your surprise birthday party after you, his kind think ginger wigs and mimes are funny. His kind must be stopped.
But how? For inspiration, we must turn to the movies. All of the following suggestions could easily be retrofitted to your vehicle by the local garage for a reasonable fee.
We begin with the Batmobile. Any incarnation will do, from the missile-launching Batman of the late 80s to the roof-tumbling badass mofo of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Late braking will be the least of your target’s worries when he sees a classified military vehicle chewing up slow-moving Pontiacs at breakneck speed. The satisfying crunch of running over the offending car would counteract any built-up tension waiting in line for movement. It would be the relief of squeezing a stress ball to the nth degree. Also, as Batmobiles are technically uninsurable, the idea of exchanging policy details with the offending driver would be laughable, and you could continue to laugh as you reversed over his smoking wreck of a car.
Better still, imagine being able to pick the asshole up by the time you get to him. Piledrive through the queues with a brilliant red-blue decal’d cab-over semi truck which then turns into Optimus Prime, supreme bad boy of cartoondom, leader of the Autobots, and the kind of help you need on a stressful journey to work. Not only would he transform from a truck into an ancient robot from outer space, but his already impressive mechanical hands would then transform into glowing energon blades, which are like lightsabers only massive, and able to tear the roof off the average Chevy. This is definite brown trousers territory for any incompetent driver. One problem you may encounter is the subsequent attack on Prime by Megatron, which would result in a delay similar to encountering single-lane roadworks.
Perhaps it would be better to play safe and fly instead. Over the years James Bond has grabbed himself his fair share of traffic-beating transport, including the infamous it-really-works! jetpack from Thunderball and Little Nellie, the gyrocopter with the odd cult following from You Only Live Twice (or, if you’re big on Connery-speak, ‘Luttal Nellayh’). Problems arise almost immediately with both of these options. Firstly, neither of them are cars, which means you would have to abandon your car on the hard shoulder. Secondly, while Little Nellie has sufficient firepower to take out a car, you have to wear a white cycling helmet which makes you look like an extra from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest. Even Connery looked like a tit in it. With the jetpack, the best you could hope for is to get run over.
If those options feel a little too sixties, how about fast-forwarding to the 80s and the flying, time-travelling DeLorean from Back to the Future. As well as making back any time you might have lost from being stuck in traffic, it has a developing retro-chic. Now you can wear that cheap Casio digital watch you won from the claw machine with pride. Again, though, as with all the flying cars on this list, problems will rapidly develop, namely the DeLorean’s build quality. Before you were ten feet in the air the entire floor would collapse and dump you on the middle lane where your face would encounter an 18-wheeler at high speeds.
Outer-world technology is a more promising proposition. The Men In Black had some excellent wheels at their disposal. A touch of the red button would send you rocketing over the standstill with the kind of rapidity normally reserved for the morning after a rich three-course Mexican. Whether you would be able to control the beast without crashing headlong into the nearest row of cars is another matter, and a question that can only be answered by giving it a go. It may well be your last trip to work.
If the thought of ending up as human soup on the tarmac doesn’t appeal, there are other alternatives available. Blade Runner had its fair share of flying cars, but to pull off the look you have to be living into a dystopian future dominated by European Union humanoid robots who have witnessed battles off the shoulder of Orion and some other such utter rubbish. It’s like living in Brussels, without the Eurostar.
Failing that, you could borrow Fab 1 off Lady Penelope and fly that about for a bit with all the other Thunderbirds. It’s as camp as a feather duster, and your chauffeur would be fresh out of prison and completely incapable of speaking like a Londoner. If you can live with that, good luck. Harry Potter also stole a spare set of wheels to get to Hogwarts, though as it’s reliant on magic to get up in the air, you might simply be stuck with a knackered Ford to get to work, in which case you could have an empty road in front of you and still be catastrophically late.
Or, like everyone else, you could sit there, trapped in a metal tin like a friendless sardine, most likely with the sun beating in at you through the windows and squeaking lorry brakes whining continuously in your ear because you had to open the windows to get a breeze in and now the exhaust fumes are making you nauseous and you feel light-headed and…
…get me Little Nellie.
