Traffic went glacial once my bus was off the downtown Portland Transit Mall. It was the sort of stuck that's almost always due to an accident, and yep, and accident had closed an eastbound lane of the Ross Island Bridge, between me and sweet, sweet home. A fellow rider called someone, asked them to check traffic cameras, waited for a call back, got that call back, and swore. We all knew the feeling.
Some of us bailed at SW 4th and Sheridan/Barbur, where traffic enters an S-curve headed towards the bridge. Adding insult to injury was an eastbound car overheating on that curve. Seeing that, I got ambitious: walk the whole way, dammit, including across the bridge (hoping that the accident had not also closed the sole sidewalk). I didn't have to do what Danny DeVito did in this bad mid-80s film called Head Office where he walked over the tops of cars to get out of a traffic jam, but I walked. Instead of my usual home arrival time of 5:35 or so, I got home at 6:15 after leaving the office at 5:00. I still beat home the #19 bus that was ahead of the #19 bus I was riding on.
OK, legs, you keep doing good work.