After a terrifying two years of rapidly increasing traffic-related fatalities, the number of people killed in traffic crashes in 2017 dropped 1.8 percent over 2016—but the NHTSA reports that 37,133 people still died, and numbers are still way up from where we were just a few years ago.

I was on the road a lot this week. I had an eight-hour round trip to Dallas on Tuesday, then a four-hour round trip to Houston Wednesday. Like most people, there are very few moments when I fully accept the danger and risk of death of driving down the road. It’s easier not to. In Houston, I couldn’t ignore it.

Traffic is to driving as apple pie is to America. You can’t have one without the other. We’ve all had our fair share of bad jams, so now I’m asking you to relive your worst.

Traffic on the 110 highway near downtown Los Angeles was ground to a halt on account of a man posted up on a sign. He seemed to be shouting and hanging signs of his own, apparently protesting pollution. Police and fire are already on the scene trying to coax the individual off the ledge safely.

A cruel and villainous groundhog was blocking traffic outside of Baltimore today, but thankfully, a cop came to dispatch true justice and shot it to death with a gun.

You’d never notice it driving by, but right in the middle of Echo Park works Baron Margo, one of the coolest car builders in the country. He builds his own retro-rocket-art cars nearly from scratch, and there’s one place he always tests them: Baxter street, one of the steepest in LA. If his cars can survive it,…

I’ve been thinking about tubes. Specifically, the weird black tubes that you often find stretched across a roadway. What are those tubes for? What are they tracking? How do they work?

A helicopter traffic camera flying over Los Angeles gridlock found something funny going on. Some motorists, desperate to not be stuck in traffic, tried to drive through a field of sand and a bunch of them got hilariously stuck anyway.

Now that’s what I call a shitty situation.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, one of the more loathsome politicians New York has ever produced—which is saying something considering the competition—has finally stumbled upon a good idea: congestion pricing for Manhattan’s streets. He’ll probably mess it up, though.

Here’s a tweet from a few of days ago that I saw last night that made me laugh, and also made me reevaluate how I deal with road rage.

This happens every year in Los Angeles (and maybe every night): a total jam on the city’s highways, thanks to Thanksgiving travel. The funny part is either that all these drivers thought they could escape the traffic by traveling a day early or that all these drivers thought they could escape the traffic in LA at all.

When I was a child, on most Thanksgivings, my parents and my brother and I would get in our car very early on Thanksgiving morning to make the three-and-a-half hour drive from our house in Kent, Ohio, to Clarksburg, West Virginia, to see family. The roads were always empty, which I took as I sign that we were doing…

Traffic on the coasts is very bad, but you probably already knew that! Here, though, are the spots where it’s very specifically bad, like I-95 from Exit 133A to Fairfax County Parkway in Virginia, which, a new study says is the worst traffic hotspot in America.

It’s kind of hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t some basic law and order on the streets, but this snapshot video from the 1930s is a perfect display of just how random and unpredictable the various traffic signals across America could be before we established the standardized system of today.

If you’ve ever been to the Motor City, you’ve probably gotten yourself lost. That’s because roads often turn at weird angles, stop and restart blocks away or unexpectedly dead end into freeways. Even lifelong natives can get completely turned around in the sprawling, tangled mess. How did a city, home to the mass…

Good morning! Welcome to The Morning Shift, your roundup of the auto news you crave, all in one place every weekday morning. Since none of you have the heart to do what is necessary—to serve the cause of true justice—read this instead.

Elon Musk hates traffic, I’m sure you’ve heard. So he wants to dig tunnels, a fairytale project that won’t help alleviate congestion and probably can’t reach the scope Musk wants. And now, local government officials in California are saying as much, reportedly calling it an “absurd pipe dream.”

“Hey! Can’t you see I’m fappin’ here?” A New Jersey man was arrested Thursday evening after parking his Dodge minivan in the middle of the Lincoln Tunnel to masturbate, reports New York. His PCP-fueled van fapstravaganza held up rush hour traffic in what is one of the nation’s busiest tunnels.

I’m not sure what happened to make the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying so insecure, but whatever it was, it must have been bad. That’s the only way that the board’s reaction to a man’s study of yellow traffic light timing makes any sense at all. Maybe the board was bullied by bigger…