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Source: The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.儲存Nov. 08--Rush hour. The clock ticks.Somewhere: A baby cries. Motor oil drips. A Pearl Jam fan plays a mean air guitar in bumper-to-bumper gridlock. And traffic is stacking up behind a TriMet bus.To the mailbag:Q: Like a lot of drivers, I get frustrated when I'm running late for work and wind up getting stuck behind a TriMet bus making frequent stops. Every day, I see cars -- a lot of cars -- crossing the solid double-yellow center line on narrow two-way streets to zip around TriMet buses making stops to pick up riders. Is this legal? I'm assuming it is, since so many people do it to get ahead of buses in heavy traffic.A: I'm going to paraphrase something that Mr. Commuting's mom once blurted out in the heady days of elasticized, gel-filled action figures in the late 1970s: "Just because Johnny Fancibrakes tries to swing from a tree using his Stretch Armstrong doll as a rope, it doesn't mean you have to try it, too."The name has been changed to protect the kid who always used to get me in trouble. But the lesson remains the same: Fashionable behavior is often wrong.In this case, crossing solid yellow center lines -- and, yes, that includes veering into a turn lane -- to pass an in-service transit vehicle is against the law.You're forgiven for being a bit confused. Like you said, countless Portland area motorists are guilty of making this illicit maneuver every day. And Oregon law, which specifically prohibits passing a stopped school bus with flashing lights, isn't as clear about public transportation.But the answer can be found in a collection of traffic statutes that prohibit crossing solid yellow center lines to pass another vehicle. Some might argue that one of ORS 811.420's exceptions -- "an obstruction or condition exists making it necessary to drive to the left of the center of the roadway" -- gives them a pass.Nope. Sorry. Those double yellows are born of safety concerns. Cross them and you're facing a $190 traffic ticket.Sure, a TriMet bus broken down in the traffic lane would qualify as such an obstruction or condition. However, a running, fully functioning TriMet bus making temporary stops doesn't.One thing to consider when you're thinking of squirming across that double yellow: Many bus stops are situated at crosswalks. Is hitting a pedestrian walking in front of a stopped bus worth shaving a few seconds off your commute?Also, imagine how annoying traffic would be if all of the people on that bus were driving a car.My advice is to give the same grace to a TriMet bus stopped on a double-yellow street as you would a stopped school bus. Frankly, that's something that we don't have enough of in traffic: grace.Q: There's a new study that's getting a lot of headlines that says Portland has the nation's eighth worst traffic congestion. I've lived in a lot of other congested cities, including L.A. anmini storage Washington, D.C., and that ranking seems far-fetched. How reliable is it?A: Not very.The 2013 TomTom Travel Index has Portland breaking into the Top 10 for the first time in the history of annual rankings released by the Amsterdam-based maker of GPS devices.Using data derived from on-board navigation systems in millions of vehicles, TomTom said Portland metro area commuters are languishing in traffic slowdowns for 31 minutes per hour driven during peak times. (PDF)It also apparently takes us 25 percent longer to get to our destinations during rush hour than when traffic is flowing freely, with the worst peak periods hitting the region on Thursday morning and Thursday evening. (Monday morning and Friday night are Portland's easiest weekday commutes, the report says.)There's no denying that rush hour traffic is getting worse as the economy improves.But while TomTom makes excellent navigation systems, its congestion rankings are based on an overly simplistic formula to measure the complex world of urban traffic. As a result, you can count on some dramatic findings that will get traffic reporters excited.Tapping into billions and billions of raw travel data points, the Index compares travel times during non-congested "free flow" hours with travel times in peak hours. The wider the gap between, say, 4 a.m. traffic and 5 p.m. traffic, the higher the congestion ranking.However, the data comes only from TomTom GPS users. Users of Garmin, Roadmate, iPhone and Android navigation systems aren't tracked.In a 2012 critique of the TomTom index, Reuters traffic correspondent Felix Salmon wrote that the report is "pretty useless." One big reason, he wrote, is that "TomTom is always going to get data weighted heavily towards people who don't know where they're going -- out-of-towners, or drivers headed to unfamiliar destinations."What's more, the methodology is biased against compact cities with shorter commutes such as Portland, said Dave Thompson, an Oregon Department of Transportation spokesman. By measuring only relative travel times, Thompson said, a 12-minute bottleneck for someone who has Portland's average 23.7-minute commute will push the congestion ranking above 50 percent."ODOT's experts aren't big fans of this math," he said.For me, the Texas A&M Transportation Institute's annual Urban Mobility Report -- which used seven different indices to rank Portland 17th on its list of America's most-congested cities -- is the most accurate.Of course, there are two things I won't dispute in the TomTom report: Los Angeles has the nation's worst traffic congestion. And San Francisco's most congested day this year was April 20 (the day of the city's "420" marijuana festival at Golden Gate Park).-- Joseph RoseCopyright: ___ (c)2013 The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) Visit The Oregonian (Portland, Ore.) at .oregonian.com Distributed by MCT Information Servicesself storage