Word: traffics
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...amazing things in their cars. They shave. They apply their makeup. They chat up the girl or guy in the neighboring car and make dates. They read. They learn foreign languages. They watch DVDs. Paulistas do all these things because they have no choice; the city's crippling traffic problem forces them to spend a major proportion of their lives inching their way through gridlock...
...biggest city are stuck behind the wheel. Saturday morning, Sunday evening, weekday afternoon, the panorama is the same: cars, bumper to bumper. "Here you go," says Alexandre Teixeira, slowing to a crawl one recent weekend. "Sao Paulo, 7:30 on a Sunday night, and we are in a traffic...
...three years," says taxi driver Fernando Ambrosio. "And it is going to get even worse. Everyone is buying cars now. There is much more financing available. I think I am going to give up and do something else, it's too stressful to spend 15 hours a day in traffic...
...Like Ambrosio, millions of Paulistas are condemned to spend large parts of their lives staring at the bumper of the vehicle in front. In the city center, the sheer volume of cars - often made worse by stop-start delivery trucks and parents on the school run - brings traffic to a grinding halt. And the absence of ring roads leaves the city's outskirts clogged by trucks and commercial vehicles, some of which are not even intending to stop in Sao Paulo, but have no route around the place. At peak hours, the accumulated tailbacks can stretch past 120 miles...
...surprising, then, that Paulistas all have traffic stories to tell. These range from the depressingly familiar - the time it took them two hours to move one city block - to the admiringly audacious - one oft-repeated tale involves a guy throwing a cell phone in the open car window of a girl he fancied, and then calling her to ask for a date. Everyone knows someone who sat so long without moving they gave up and parked their car to wait it out at the nearest coffee shop. And with a construction boom under way, some people are now complaining...