Whether it was your morning commute or a vacation trip, has your vehicle had a breakdown in heavy traffic? What happened, what did you do, and how long did it take to get you back on the road?
I don’t drive, so I have no such stories to share.
I had a flat in morning rush one time. I was able to pull over and change it in a few minutes, so I wasn’t that guy who messed it up for everybody, thank god.
I broke down during morning rush hour right in the middle of a bunch of highway construction on the hill that heads south/west out of Spokane. The highway was narrowed down to a single lane with concrete barriers on either side, and there was no room to pull over. There was a small pick-up truck directly behind me, and the driver offered to push me with his bumper until we could find a spot to pull my crappy little '84 Escort out of the way.
I was late to class, after getting a ride from my car, but so were a lot of other people that day due to a “terrible back up on the freeway.” I didn’t let them know that I was the cause of the trouble. Apparently traffic was at a standstill for several miles behind me.
Not all that heavy traffic, but I once blew an engine in the center of the main drag of town, on a Saturday afternoon, while wearing Renaissance Faire costume. Luckily, two of my former students were gassing up at a filling station nearby and came to help me push my car into the lot. The guys in the shop across the street saw me, towed my car over there, and got it repaired within 24 hours. During the entire affair not one person mentioned my clothing. (Envision Miami Steve Van Sandt, only colorful and period.) (At the time I belonged to a gypsy troupe.)
I knew somebody that had this happen.
They had just bought a brand new big ass dual rear wheeled truck. The reason for the truck was to tow a massive dual axle fifth wheel trailer (think big RV size minus the engine in the front). They then went on vacation, driving through Atlanta during monday morning rush hour. Well, apparently the brakes on both axles of the trailer locked up. While he was driving at high speed. It ripped both axles from their mounts.
So, now he is alongside the interstate during August in downtown Atlanta. He had to hang out there till late in the evening when they could get the specialized vehicles in there to fix this big mess and tow it out of there. I think it fracked up the truck too.
Oh, terrible him you say?
Nope, he’s one of the biggest assholes I’ve ever meet. Couldnt have happened to a nicer guy 
It was one hot summerday on my way to work, the traffic going slooow. I was listening to my friend’s new metal album and didn’t mind too much when things on the dashboard started to beep and blink; I panicked and pulled over and turned everything off. I was in my thirties and just recently got my driver’s license and the car was kinda new and I didn’t know what the heck I should do now – so I called my wife. She was actually the one who learned me how to drive and in either case a bit less panicked than me. After checking this and that with her on the phone, the car started without any blinks or beeps and I could go on. It turned out later that the fan didn’t work, and the car worked when I had cooled down. – The good thing about this was that when my friend asked me how I liked the album, I could honestly say it was great, but my car overheated playing it.
Heavy traffic? No. I’ve had 3 different cars break down on the highway. One of them I towed home and the other 2 I fixed on the highway.
My wife had barely been driving in the U.S. for a few days (and had never driven anywhere else) when a friend took her to New York for something or other. Fortunately her friend was driving.
The car broke down inside the Lincoln Tunnel :eek:
The tunnel folks are adept at handling such things, and they towed them out pronto.
I can’t think of too many other places that would suck more than that. Of course, the immediate response from the Port Authority towing folks sort of mitigates the suckiness of the situation, but it still sounds awful.
My car died in the third lane (of 4 or 5) of the 101 in Agoura Hills, CA. It sputtered once, then just turned off and I coasted to a halt. Traffic was very heavy, and I was unable to get out of my lane once I’d dropped in speed just a little. I coasted to a stop. It was a slight uphill, so I wasn’t even confident that I could push it off the road myself.
I just sat there for 30-40 seconds trying to start it until some awesome guy pulled over ahead, got out, stopped the two lanes of traffic and got behind the car. He pushed, and I got out and pushed through the door until we got it off the road.
Lots of breakdowns that day, and a fire on the side of the road meant that traffic soon slowed to a crawl. It was 2+ hours before AAA got there, although a nice highway patrol officer stopped twice to make sure I was ok. I just sat off to the side under this scrubby brush to stay out of the sun and read my book.
Turned out it was the battery that had died. I didn’t even know that a battery could die in a way that would make the car turn off in the middle of driving, but it can.
We broke down on the packed Cross Bronx Expressway a few years ago. The alternator died on an overpass and the car beeped once and then just shut off. Fortunately, I was not driving. We had no functioning turn signals, couldn’t get the power windows down to wave, etc. I seriously thought we were about to die or cause a terrible accident. Somehow, by the grace of G-d, we were just close enough to a downhill exit ramp at the time to allow my mom to use the car’s remaining momentum to coast down it and onto the shoulder of a side street. We then spent 4 hours stranded in the South Bronx waiting for the car to be repaired.
This stuff always happens to my mom. The other incident I remember is breaking down on the exit ramp to Route 29 N off the Inner Loop of the Capital Beltway during rush hour. This was before cell phones and me and my brother, ages 6 and 4 at the time, were in the back seat. People were just barely able to squeeze by us (it’s a single lane ramp) or it would have been a traffic nightmare of epic proportions because that’s one of the most heavily used exits on the Beltway. Somehow, some way, another driver took pity on the stranded mom with two little kids and managed to get us a tow truck out there without too much delay. I remember being incredibly excited to get to ride in the cab and wanting to ride in the car while it was being dragged along behind. I do not recall my mom freaking out or yelling at us or any of the expected reactions. She kept the whole thing very calm. It must have been a horrendous ordeal, but I was too young to appreciate it.
I’ve not only broken down in the street in traffic (got someone who lives around there to help me push the car out of the street), I have broken down in a drive-thru lane!
Oh lord yes. I used to drive some real hooptys. On top of that, there was one era when I all could afford to put on my Beetle was $10 retread tires. I changed 8 flats in a week one time, all on the side of the road.
One time I was driving a '64 Ford Galaxy and had a flat, in a curve, on a road with no shoulder. Traffic wasn’t too bad but lo and behold, a Jehova’s Witness stopped behind me and came around to TALK. He did not offer to help me as I wrestled the flat tire off and put the spare on (those were ginormous wheel/tires that I had to hug to my chest to even move), he didn’t offer to help with cracking the lugs or operating the jack. No, he just wanted to TALK and TALK about JAYSUS. :rolleyes:
One of the worst times, I was driving a pickup truck and it was during peak traffic hours. This particular truck used to have a shifter on the steering column, but someone had put in a shifter in the floor. They had heated and bent the linkages so that they sometimes got kinked up, jamming the shifter; you had to get under the truck with a prybar and knock/pry them loose.
Sure enough, the light turned green and I put it in gear, but the linkages chose that moment to embrace each other. So out into the crazy traffic and under the truck I went, prybar in hand, trying to whack & pry the damn things loose. That was pretty hairy.
One time my car died at the tail end of rush hour on a busy highway, in the middle lane. I panicked mightily and managed to turn it off and turn it back on again while coasting so as not to get smooshed. I was in a '97 Escort but this was like in 2000!
My friend was driving a van to downtown Cleveland to get it fixed (it was a fleet thing) when the van died. He saw a truck coming behind him that couldn’t avoid him, so he put his head on his arms and held on. The truck did indeed smoosh the van, but he was basically ok.
I was driving home from work (I have a permit but not a license, so my boyfriend was with me) in heavy-ish traffic (it was too late in the evening for rush hour, but it was certainly busy) when the noise from our back tire–which we’d been hearing for the past few days, but thought it was nothing–got louder, and I noticed that the drive just kinda…felt funny. It wasn’t that much different from normal, but I just got the feeling that something wasn’t right. We pulled over, boyfriend inspected the tire, and sure enough, it was flat. We had no idea how to change one, so we called my dad, who had trouble finding us. While he was on his way, some officers pulled up and let us use their flashlight while we read the instructions that came with the spare tire that told us how to change it. By the time my dad got there, we’d already finished and were ready to leave.
As it turns out, the sound we’d been hearing had been a broken spring, the end of which carved a neat circular gash in the tire as we drove. There wasn’t any hope for patching up the thing, and the officers told us that the rear tires weren’t exactly street legal anyway, so boyfriend ended up getting two new tires the next day.
I also made my boyfriend drive the rest of the way home, if just because I was nervous about merging back onto the highway.
The closest I’ve been to having that happen is running out of gas (bad gas gauge) on the freeway. I somehow managed to shift to neutral and coast down a nearby off ramp, into a gas station and right to a pump.
There was the time that the clutch cable snapped. In retrospect, I don’t know why we didn’t try to just soldier on merrily in first gear. Regardless, we were in heavy Bay Bridge traffic, trying to get into San Francisco with about 250,000 other cars.
Then there was the time I was “That Guy” also in Bay Bridge AM commute traffic, alongside the parking lot. (It’s a traffic reporting landmark about a half-mile before the tollbooths.) The Ford Taurus front clip is apparently made of balsa and tissue paper as a rear-ending that merely bent the other guy’s license plate completely disabled the Taurus with a broken battery and a cracked radiator.
Had my car overheat and die on the FDR expressway in Manhattan during the evening rush hour once. Fortunately, I was able to pull over and let it cool down for a while, add some fluid in had in my trunk to the radiator, and get going again.
I was in the left hand lane of I 84 outbound from downtown Portland during Friday afternoon rush hour traffic. I was at 64th street, so I wasn’t even very far.
My clutch master cylinder went out. Bam. My Dodge Ram was going NOWHERE.
I was blocking the left lane, and every motorist had a helpful suggestion for me as each went around. Most of the suggestions, though, were anatomically impossible.
So…I called AAA. And waited. And waited. And waited.
And after about 20 minutes, a guy in a pickup pulls up and parks in front of me. He’s in the Air Force and is on his way out to the base. He has a tow rope. He hooks it up and tows me across three lanes of traffic to an island between the freeway and the offramp.
Not heroic…but he was a hero. To this day I don’t know who he was. What a great guy!
Timing belt broke when I was one car back from one of the only 2 toll booths at my exit of the Pike. It was rush hour and I had about 10 cars behind me already with more coming. The toll booth attendants from both booths saw that I was having trouble and turned off their booth lights. One blocked traffic from the lane next to me and the other pushed me into the parking lot (I was in the left booth lane and the lot was on the right). Then they both returned to their booths, turned their lights back on, and one called a tow truck while clearing his lane of cars. The tow truck came in about 20 minutes and towed me about 3 miles to my boyfriend’s parents’ house. It added about 40 minutes to my commute and only blocked traffic for about 2 minutes.
: raises hand : I was driving down the Northway one morning in rush hour traffic, several years ago, when the distributor cap abruptly blew on my car. I didn’t know this at the time, of course, all I know is the engine shut off and my speed started dropping. I was able to get over into the right lane and pull off the road.
I walked about half a mile or a mile to the nearest gas station, and called my SO, and called a tow company. When I got back to the car, I found that during the rush hours there is a HELP truck provided by the county that drives around and, well, helps people. They had left me a note and driven on. I had no idea.
I waited around for the tow truck. A cop stopped to help me, but I told him a tow was coming, so he went off.
I also had a tire once blow, but I was in town. Still busy, but nowhere near. And I used to drive a beater of a car that used to stall out at traffic lights sometimes. Trying to start it up with people honking at you was always a fun (read: humiliating) experience.
NinetyWt, I would have snapped at him for sure.