Traffic

For the last 4 weeks I have made almost daily trips to Boulder for work. The trip is about 55 miles in total and can take anywhere from 50 minutes to over 2 hours depending upon conditions. The conditions that I speak of are the weather conditions and the traffic conditions. It is fairly obvious that the weather conditions can easily effect the traffic. The worse the weather is, the slower the traffic moves. Besides the weather there are things that effect the traffic that I just do not understand or imagine. Particularly during the morning drive I have noticed that the traffic goes through "pulses". What do I mean by that? The traffic will come to a complete halt and you will sit there for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes and then as abruptly as the traffic stopped it will start moving again. After it starts moving again the traffic will quickly reach a high rate of speed - 40 or more miles per hour. In another mile or so, the traffic will "pulse" again and you will come to a dead halt. For the life of me, I can not figure out what is causing these "pulses" in the traffic. It just does not make any sense to me whatsoever. The other aspect of the traffic is how accidents on the other side of the road totally slow down traffic on your side of the road. Everyone has to stop and rubberneck! Then there is the fact that police seem to position themselves at strategic spots to purposefully slow traffic. It is not like they are going to be catching any speeders when the traffic is moving so slowly already. It really seems like they just want to slow things down even more. Oh well - I haven't had to do this for too long and hopefully my adventures in commuting to Boulder will only last the next several months - but I am sure I will have more observations on the flow of traffic! Til later... Thanks and peace to all! ~J.