"a line-up stretching 32 miles into London, but a Highways Agency spokesman denied any problems saying it was a typical Monday morning"
Some things never change, especially with Bureaucrats: Joan Didion’s wonderful 1976 essay “Bureaucrats,” concerning the imposition of car-pool (or High-Occupancy Vehicle, HOV) lanes on the Los Angeles freeway system. The California Department of Transportation—Caltrans—decided that it wanted to change the way people drive, in the name of the environment. Or something. So it introduced a pilot program on the Santa Monica Freeway: the “Diamond Lane.” The Diamond Lane was an HOV prototype, reserved for buses and cars with more than three riders. At the time of the Diamond Lane’s inception, the Santa Monica Freeway carried 240,000 cars per day, conveying a total of 260,000 people.
Caltrans decided that it would prefer to eliminate 7,800 of those vehicles—that was, literally, their precisely-stated goal—by forcing people to carpool. Thus the Diamond Lanes reserved 25 percent of the available highway space for 3 percent of the vehicles. As you might imagine, pandemonium ensued.
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Olympians greeted by reports of 32-mile queues - Channel 4 News
16 July 2012
With today's opening of the M4's "Games lane" to accommodate an influx of Olympic athletes, motorists faced morning rush hour queues reportedly up to 32 miles long.
For many visitors, their first glimpse of London were queues and traffic chaos. Heathrow Airport was expected to process 10,000 more passengers than normal as competitors flew in from around the world today, most of them headed from the airport across town to the Olympic village.
But it was an accident rather than a crack in the road that frustrated motorists making the slow crawl into London this morning. The accident, combined with the introduction of a dedicated "Olympic Family" lane between 5am and 10pm, left motorists on the M4 fuming. At one point, the line-up began at the A34 as traffic from three lanes merged into two lanes and a traffic accident near Junction 11 shut Reading.
"It was a knock-on effect," AA spokesman Paul Watters told Channel 4 News. "The rush hour added to the complexity."
The Telegraph reported a line-up stretching 32 miles into London, but a Highways Agency spokesman denied any problems saying it was a typical Monday morning. Video footage showed motorist inching their way into London, at times coming to a complete stop.
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