radio stations and their traffic reports

I don't listen to morning radio shows too often, mainly because all of them here in the Sacramento valley are terrible. Come to think of it, radio in general here in the valley isn't too hot; a couple stations are okay, but with the recent demise of KWOD (for what reason exactly? oh yeah, because we need ANOTHER top 40 station to only really play the top 15). When I lived in the Bay Area, I often listeded to Alice (KLLC, 97.3) in the morning because they have a much more entertaining radio show. It wasn't always great, but the people are so much more lively and have such a better "thing" going on between them, a better dynamic if you will.

I tuned into Alice this morning because I couldn't find anything to suit my picky nd ever changing tastes for music as I drove into work, and the first thing I heard was the current traffic report. Now, in general, traffic reports are useless unless you actually haven't left your house / work yet. There's really no point to knowing what's going on on the roads when you can just as easily look out your car window (kinda like checking the weather on the TV when you could just look outside). There is one exception to this, and that is when, if you are lucky, they actually provide a report for the freeway YOU are on (instead of just every other freeway), and actually tell you where the accident is, AND it's far enough ahead that you can exit and take surface streets to get around the problem. This of course also assumes there are convenient and usable surface streets to take around the problem, which is generally not the case when you commute 101 along the SF peninsula.

Anyway, they reported something about delays on 280, 85, 17, 880, 680, and pretty much everywhere else. I think at one point they may have even said that traffic on the Bay Bridge was so slow it was moving backwards. In the midst of all that gooey trafficy gridlocked insanity, I had to hoot and hollar because my new commute takes 20 minutes and (so far) rarely ever involves gridlocked traffic. What's my point? I was happy about my new commute! That's all.