Usually if traffic is heavy in one direction in the morning, it will be the opposite in the evening as people go to and from work, but this is not the case with the Aberdeen tunnel. It seems to only be slow in one direction because traffic out of the tunnel into the Wanchai district is impacted by backed up traffic from Causeway Bay and the Central tunnel, which are busy at almost all times. My bus ride to my site office takes ten minutes in the morning but the ride home takes from thirty minutes to an hour. This morning was the first time that it was slow going to Aberdeen but the reason became obvious when we emerged from the slow moving tunnel: three very nice, black luxury cars had gotten into an accident at high enough speeds to do some damage. The BMW no longer had a trunk and the Lexus was crunched up like an accordion, though only in the front and back so I hope that he driver escaped safely. I didn't see what happened to the third car because the police van was blocking my view. Then the car in front of my bus ran into the one in front of it and that pretty much closed down the remaining lanes of traffic until an aggravated officer walked over and told the two rubberneckers to stop taking pictures of the scratches on their cars and pull over.
Last week my Friday ride home was unusually bad; it took one and a half hours to go home. As far as I could tell, there were no accidents but Causeway Bay was so congested that traffic had become backed up all the way to Wong Chuk Hang. But like I said, it was an extreme situation that will be somewhat alleviated when the stations that I am working on open. There's nothing like experiencing ridiculous gridlock to and from the office to motivate the site team into a high work rate. The usual procedure is to play hot potato with an issue, passing it from Civil to Structural to Architectural to Building Services until someone finally has to bite but we don't have time for that crap. While we are solving issues at a fast rate, I am also under extra pressure because I need to make decisions with less time to recheck all of the supporting documents or call up the HQ team. If the station is really ugly, it is probably all my fault because I approved the alternative finishing material. If it is nice, then it was probably because it was done according to the drawings.
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