Viagra Highway

Viagra Improves Traffic Flow

The 401, a major artery into and out of Toronto, suffers a condition twice daily that is the bane of commuters all around: Rush hour.

This legendary misnomer and cause of high blood pressure is found in two main peaks, appropriately labeled morning and evening rush hours. The flow is strained towards the downtown core in the morning, and towards suburbia in the evening. When an accident occurs, you can be sure that traffic will grind to a grueling pace, with both  tempers and temperatures rising, for drivers and their cars.

Several systems help to reduce the impact of these rushes; a helicopter reports trouble areas, so drivers may bypass the blockage. During the winter, snow plows clear the build-up of snow and improve traction. A few cameras help the internet-savvy plan their route. Chevron markings aid the driver in avoiding mid-flow coagulation (collisions) by setting nearness limits between vehicles.

Off the highway, one may expect to see signs dictating "No Left Turns" or "Buses Only" during the rush hours "7-9 am or 4-6 pm". Everywhere one is faced with "Take the Go Train", or "Take the TTC", inviting commuters to use the existing mass transit system of integrated trains, buses, subways and streetcars. But it seems never enough.

Viagra is, ultimately, a vasodilator. A vasodilator widens blood vessels in order to increase blood flow. If your car was a blood cell, Viagra would cause the highway to widen before you.

A highway is constructed of parallel lanes. Each lane is essentially a line: It is a minimum of thickness with respect to each vehicle, thus, can be said to be "one vehicle wide", with a vehicle being a "point" of varying length along this line. A common measure in the paving industry is "lane-miles", which, simply, is the amount of surface area to be paved. Since the width of a lane is often a (local) constant, a lane-mile is also a (local) constant. Thus, a road that is one lane wide and six miles long will use six lane-miles, or roughly the same as a road that is six lanes wide and one mile long - no matter what direction the traffic flows on each lane.

A section of the 401 Highway has six lanes. During the morning rush hour, the city-bound traffic will dominate the space of one side (three lanes), then in the afternoon this will reverse itself, as the cars head home to the suburbs. Much of the space of the entire highway (a six-lane plane) will be idle, as little traffic will fill half of the available surface area.

How do we increase the traffic flow without adding lane-miles or increasing speed limits?

Enter "Highway-Strength Viagra"...

Separating the halves of the highway in spots are simple concrete medians. This short wall is often portable, thus can become a temporary portal as necessary, and are readily replaced if damaged. Viagra would take advantage of this mobility, causing the entire concrete median to slide side to side. In the morning, as traffic bunches up along a stretch towards the city, "Highway-Strength Viagra" would slide the highway on that side open a bit. It would become four or lanes wide city-bound and two lanes wide suburb-bound. Naturally, in the evening, this process would reverse itself. The highway would be of varying width throughout the day, regulating traffic through simultaneous vasoconstrictions and vasodilatations.

Viagra only really signals the change. We need muscle, such as electric motors to move the median. Naturally, we would need wheels or a low-friction surface as well to reduce energy costs - say rails or "polarized pavement" (a pavement that provides traction in one direction and is perpendicularly slippery) set in a harmless pattern of strips that match protrusions in the bottom of the concrete medians. Let your imagination go from here.

But now I must return to the body - my body, to be exact. I was once a heavy smoker. Nicotine  (the "good stuff" of the cigarette that accompanied many of my written words) is a vasoconstrictor. For many years it helped me fight my postural hypotension; a condition that was cause of debilitating dizzy spells. I stood up, but my blood didn't. I quit smoking when the cigarettes no longer helped against the dizzy spells, but I still had the same side effects. That was in June of 2001, and, despite hourly cravings, writers block and outrageous causes of stress since, I have stayed the course. But I'll never forget what I learned.

One day my legs were really aching. Someone said that perhaps it was the cigarettes, as I smoked between 50 and 75 per day (yeah, you read that right...). They said that the effect of the vasoconstriction can be felt if you have too many cigarettes. Indeed, I had inhaled an unusually large amount in the hours prior.

The body is constantly adjusting the width of its highways. This is how blood gets to the brain when we are standing, for example - the narrowing of the highways in the legs coupled with a widening of those in the head. The body uses muscles instead of motors, and the muscles are used for vasoconstriction, opposing the elastic bias that makes for vasodilatation. Since our highway is essentially two arteries, opposed, but attached and working in conjunction with each other, one can envision a motor system that pulls on one side, or gives in to an elastic pulling on the other.

Metaphors, used in reverse engineering, can be as much a tool of invention as they are tools of teaching or learning. The above examples are only two along a whole line of metaphors, each rich with invention and discovery. Naturally, one can see a connection to hydraulics is forming in the above sequence, which, in turn, leads us to spiders - but that is another story!

This section of highway in Montreal, Quebec uses a series of signal lights to manage the flow of traffic to and from the downtown core. Some areas specify certain hours, resembling the changing circulation patterns of our daily circadian rhythm. Our blood pressure is highest during the day and lowest during the night, matching our traffic patterns, necessitating a strikingly similar process of widening and narrowing "arteries". The metaphorical comparison of a car with a blood cell or a society with a  life form seem intuitive in such cases, forming a continuum that is the basis for the Language of Metaphors.