Readers who have followed this space for a while now, know that I have a love-hate relationship with the traffic situation here in Nassau: I love to hate driving here.


However, I think I have a legitimate beef, whether I have to go downtown or over the bridge to Paradise Island. In fact, here is a list of the things about driving here in Nassau that annoyed me today:


1) The community I live in has installed "temporary" rubber speed bumps down the entire length of the only road in or out of the neighborhood. By the time I have actually traversed the eight bumps one-way, my fillings have been jarred lose from my teeth. My dentist bills are horrendous, and my kids are beginning to look like bobble-head figurines in the back seat.


2) Speed bumps again. I had to drop my son off to the school he will attend in the fall. From the Gargantuan size of the newly-installed speed bumps in the parking lot, it appears that quite a number of parents are driving M4 75mm Sherman tanks, and that the school figured they were just a bit too heavy footed on their pick-up run. The bumps were so large, it took me 10 minutes to get over them, and I got a nosebleed in the process.


3) Because it’s nearly election time, and the party in power seemingly needs votes in our constituency, the government has begun to pave one of the main roads in the area. They have only been working at it for 3 ½ weeks now and have managed to finish a 1/4 of the job. But the main annoyance is one small pot hole that the paving crew ignored, but that is perfectly situated on the road to catch my front tire each and every time I drive by it.


4) Same road, different problem. In order to prep the road for the paving job mentioned in #3, a large front-end loader clawed up the existing speed bumps, leaving an open trench of fairly level shell rock. Unfortunately, the Spring rains arrived about 9 minutes after the last bump was clawed up, and washed the fill out of the trench entirely. This left a gaping hole in the road the size of Rhode Island that got progressively larger with each day.


By the end of week one, the hole was the size of Kentucky and had consumed three Diahatsu vehicles and one flatbed water delivery truck. The drivers were never heard from again. The government paving crew didn’t seem to notice until the void in the pavement got to be the size of Arizona and the hole applied for independence from Nassau with the United Nations.


An emergency-response paving crew quickly quelled such rebellious talk with some hot tar and several bucket loads of asphalt.


5) And then I see this:

and this:

I know. It looks pretty bleak on the roads here. But you just wait until I talk about the jitneys!