Line #35 Main/PostApocalypticTrafficJam


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2	%%The examples on this page have been sorted alphabetically. Please help keep this page tidy by adding new ones in order. Thank you!
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4	[[quoteright:350:[[Series/TheWalkingDead2010 https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/wallpaper_803341.jpg]]]]
5	[[caption-width-right:350:Whatever happened in the city, [[DamnedByFaintPraise at least there'll be plenty of vacancies]]!]]
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7	->''Along the interstate in the distance long lines of charred and rusting cars. The raw rims of the wheels sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber, in blackened rings of wire. The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped off the bare springs of the seats.''
8	-->-- ''Literature/TheRoad''
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10	It's JustBeforeTheEnd, and the destruction of the world is imminent. Whether WorldWarIII, the ZombieApocalypse, a FlamingMeteor, an AlienInvasion or some other EarthShatteringKaboom, the citizens [[CitywideEvacuation need to escape the cities, and fast]]! Unfortunately for humanity, the end result when so many people try to OutrunTheFireball at the same time is a BigHonkingTrafficJam.
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12	Cut to AfterTheEnd, and our ragtag heroes fortunately escaped the doom which befell most of humanity. As they wander the roads, searching for food, other survivors, and/or a better life, they stumble across a highway leading out of the city packed bumper-to-bumper with vehicles abandoned and destroyed by the late cataclysm. These cars haven't gone anywhere in years, nor are they likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
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14	The post-apocalyptic traffic jam is a way to show the panic and chaos which occurred during the just before and during the end. People don't leave their cars willingly in unless the car has become a detriment; thus it indicates that they were fleeing, and thought they stood a better chance on foot (perhaps because of the traffic jam having slowed the speed so much that running was a speedier escape), or that the occupants tried to flee and failed, leaving the wreckage of the car (and perhaps their corpses) where they stood. An apocalyptic traffic jam could result even if the drivers of the vehicles didn't necessarily all get incapacitated at the same time: a small percentage of drivers suddenly being unable to drive will keep anyone behind them from making much progress while still in their car, and encourage them to continue on foot. Frequently, all the abandoned cars are going in only one direction, and the part of the road meant for cars going the other direction is empty. It conveys that everyone was trying to escape (or take refuge in) a specific location (but also keeps the cars from being an actual obstacle to the protagonist's travels). Often, a GhostCity is located at the tail end of the traffic jam.
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16	Besides providing information about the late apocalypse, the post-apocalyptic traffic jam can serve as a [[DisasterScavengers source of food and equipment]] for our hero, or be a potential danger if those behind the wheel [[ZombieApocalypse aren't really dead]].
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18	The Post-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam is a sub-trope of AbandonedArea. It could also be a form of UnexpectedlyAbandoned if the hero SleptThroughTheApocalypse or was LateToTheTragedy. It shares similarities with GhostTown, GhostCity and GhostPlanet.
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21	!!Examples:
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23	[[foldercontrol]]
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25	[[folder:Comic Books]]
26	* ''ComicBook/ThePunisherTheEnd'': Frank and Peters see a lot of abandoned cars, their owners killed as they were trying to flee (Frank notes that the EMP kills the engines and the fallout isn't far behind). They spend the night in "a schoolbus full of assisted suicides".
27	* ''ComicBook/YTheLastMan'': Since the disaster consisted of all men in the world instantaneously dying at the same time, many cars that were on roads at the time found themselves without a driver. Multiple factors, such as panicked reactions and simply being stuck behind dead drivers, resulted in all other cars being abandoned as well.
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30	[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]
31	* ''Film/TwentyEightDaysLater'': The protagonists have to drive in a black cab through a dark tunnel packed with vehicles, mostly by driving over them. [[DarknessEqualsDeath This is universally regarded as a bad idea]], but they drive through successfully only to get a flat tire. Then a SwarmOfRats come running up the tunnel, followed by the Infected they're fleeing from.
32	* ''Film/TheBookOfEli'': The opening scene features the protagonist walking down a highway jammed with long-abandoned vehicles, thereby establishing the post-apocalyptic setting
33	* ''Film/TheDayAfter'': The precursor to this trope appears when the mass of people fleeing an impending nuclear attack on Kansas City becomes trapped in a doomed traffic jam.
34	* It's more ''Pre''-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam, but in ''Film/IndependenceDay'' after the City Destroyers take position over major cities around the world, everybody and their dog try their damnedest to evacuate, leading to a scene in which David Levinson and his father Julius are the only people in the lanes heading [[WashingtonDCInvasion towards Washington, D.C.]] while the other half of the highway is loaded with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Jasmine Dubrow and her son are also stuck in a similar traffic jam of people fleeing Los Angeles. A later scene in which the military tries to nuke a City Destroyer flying over Houston has a brief shot of an APC sent to surveil the nuke's effectiveness stopping on an overpass that has the "outgoing" lanes full with empty cars (General Grey mentions to President Whitmore that the city was evacuated hours ago, and that “casualties should be at a minimum” - looks like the people of Houston wasted no time in abandoning their cars and getting out of town).
35	* ''Film/LeaveTheWorldBehind'' has one with a twist. Every single car in the traffic jam is a [[AutomatedAutomobiles self-driving]] Tesla, the cars having gone haywire after the cyberattack that kicked off the plot, many of them having driven right off a dealership lot with the EPA decals still in their windows. The protagonists are nearly killed when more Teslas come speeding down the highway and slamming into the ones already stranded.
36	* ''Franchise/MonsterVerse'':
37	** ''Film/Godzilla2014'': PlayedWith, and more like ''Mid''-Apocalyptic Traffic Jam. Naturally, once the [=MUTOs'=] rampage becomes a public-known national disaster, roads become packed with a BigHonkingTrafficJam. Made worse by the fact that the female MUTO emits an EMP sphere of influence that causes electronics to stop working. We’re treated to a shot of a crashed plane with safety slides deployed, sitting on top of a highway overpass, which is absolutely crowded with bumper-to-bumper cars, while the more intrepid drivers whose vehicles still work are cutting across the grass to try and avoid the jam.
38	** ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'': One brief shot in the film shows that Boston has another Mid-Apocalypse Traffic Jam when Ghidorah is commanding the Titans to help him raze the planet, and it's also mentioned in the novelization.
39	* ''Film/AQuietPlacePartII''. Regan is walking along the train tracks and comes across a train carriage stopped on the rails. She enters to find it full of corpses and the side ripped open like a sardine can, along with every other carriage. Later she and Emmett cross the South Grand Island Bridge, and both spans are clogged with abandoned cars.
40	* A pre-apocalyptic version in ''[[Film/TheSilence2019 The Silence]]'' (2019). The protagonists get stuck in a traffic jam as they flee to the country to escape the vesps, whom they assume will be drawn to the noisy cities. Rather than wait till the vesps are attracted by all the [[BigHonkingTrafficJam honking motorists]], Glenn drives off the highway and uses his SUV to blaze a trail for the others in their minivan. Unfortunately, he ends up crashing thanks to a herd of deer.
41	* ''Film/Terminator2JudgmentDay'': One of the opening shots shows a long line of burned-out cars on a highway. One of them still has the driver's skeleton behind the wheel. Downplayed, though, in that Judgment Day caught humanity completely by surprise, so the traffic jam wasn't caused by people trying to escape the chaos; it was just the everyday gridlock that Los Angeles had always dealt with up until the bombs dropped.
42	* ''Film/WorldWarZ'': The movie shows a long line of stalled cars leading to a city after the ZombieApocalypse.
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45	[[folder:Gamebooks]]
46	* In ''Literature/FreewayFighter'', set in an alternate 2015 where a virus wiped out most of humanity, you can come across an abandoned street full of vehicles. If you have a crowbar, you're given a chance to pry open some of their boots to salvage items (choosing this option and you can get a BulletproofVest from an abandoned police car).
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49	[[folder:Literature]]
50	* In ''Literature/CiaphasCain'', the eponymous Commissar drives along a major highway on Perlia heading towards a town that was attacked some time ago to link up with reinforcements. The highway is jammed full of (wrecked) civilian cars that were attacked by the Orks who invaded the planet a few months ago. Cain notes that most of the cars stood no chance against the ordnance used by the Orks, mentioning the grisly sight of the occupants slouched dead in them, some of them killed weeks ago.
51	-->'''Cain:''' Whoever those unfortunate souls were, only the Emperor knew, and probably only he cared.
52	* ''Literature/{{Emberverse}}'': The series' apocalypse, the Change, caused all higher technology to suddenly cease working and happened instantaneously all over the world. Consequently, every road and highway on the planet became a graveyard of cars that would never run again, each stopped where it drifted to a halt after its systems died. They also became the graveyard of the hordes of motorists stranded there, as most of them died of starvation or exposure either while waiting for rescue or while trying to follow the roads towards a city.
53	* In ''Literature/GoodOmens'' one of these starts to form on the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M25_motorway M25 London orbital motorway]] when the Apocalypse begins thanks to Crowley having arranged for it to be built in the shape of the dark sigil Odegra, meaning "all hail the great beast, devourer of worlds." This proves an inconvenience for him as he's trying to leave London and stop the Apocalypse, especially as it comes to be ringed with fire.
54	* In ''Literature/Nightfall1990'', the characters need to traverse a highway packed with unmoving cars in the wake of a total societal collapse.
55	* In ''Literature/TheRoad'', a father and son wandering the road of a post-apocalyptic {{crapsack world}}, where an undefined cataclysmic disaster (perhaps a nuclear war, a meteor, or a super volcano) has turned the earth and sky to ash, and humanity has been forced into cannibalism to survive. Whatever the cause, there was some fore-warning as the highways out of the cities are described as containing "a long line of charred and rusting cars."
56	* A number of these are described in ''Literature/StationEleven''. In one chapter, Kirsten encounters one while scouting a highway overpass.
57	--> ''The highway was miles of permanent gridlock, with small trees growing now between cars and thousands of windshields reflecting the sky. There was a skeleton in the driver's seat of the nearest car.''
58	* In ''Literature/TheStand'', there are a few along the way. Stu and Tom look through one to find a stick shift car that Stu can drive with his injured leg since Tom can't drive. Later, on the way back to Boulder, they're in an area of deep snow and Stu finds that they're actually on top of one of these, which is buried under the snow. There's also the Lincoln Tunnel which has become nearly impassible due to the jam caused by the sick and dying trying to escape New York. One of the characters is forced to make his way through on foot, navigating between the cars in pitch blackness. Another example, part of "The Kid" segment cut from the original edition of the book but restored in later versions, is the traffic jam that puts a halt to The Kid and Trashcan Man's journey to Las Vegas. The Kid refuses to leave his car behind, and tries to force Trashcan Man at gunpoint to somehow move the cars out of the way ''by hand''. [[spoiler: This proves to be his undoing, as Randall Flagg sends a flock of wolves to save Trashcan Man, and leaves The Kid trapped in his own car to either slowly starve to death or be killed by the wolves. He eventually chooses the latter, and his corpse is found by some of the other characters.]]
59	* ''Literature/WorldWarZ'': Occurs several times. One of the survivor's accounts is of a pilot whose plane crashed and as a result she had to parachute out over zombie-infested territory. At one point, she makes her way out on a highway for a helicopter to pick her up; she notes that the highway is full of cars and in many of the cars are zombies reaching out of the windows for her. Another account is told from the perspective of a blimp pilot; he noted that from overhead, you could see highways filled with survivors evacuating cities, with a horde of zombies following the vehicles.
60	* ''Literature/TheZombieSurvivalGuide'' warns about these. Very often, someone was infected by the zombie virus, tried to escape in a vehicle, succumbed to the virus, and reanimated in that vehicle.
61	* ''Literature/TheWalkingDeadRiseOfTheGovernor'': The main characters are forced to deal with several of these while trying to get into Atlanta, encountering more and more chaos along the way, and at one point, the entire section of highway is ''on fire''!
62	* Discussed in ''Resurrection Day'' by Brendan [=DuBois=], an alternate history novel where the Cuban Missile Crisis became World War 3. There's an ongoing crime problem involving gangs of orphan children. The protagonist explains that when the sirens went off the teachers herded the children into the school shelters, whereas the first instinct of their parents was to take the car and rush to pick up their children, so they were caught out in the open when the nukes went off.
63	* Played with in the Creator/GeneWolfe short story "Bluesberry Jam", published in the 1996 anthology ''Space Opera''. The protagonist is a boy who's grown up in an endless traffic jam that's lasted for years. The rest of the world seems fine, and supplies the inhabitants with food from helicopter drops.
64	* In ''Literature/ZoneOne'', one of the protagonists prior missions was to clear the wreckage of a post-apocalyptic traffic jam on I-95 in Connecticut, including dealing with zombie still trapped in the wreckage.
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67	[[folder:Live-Action TV]]
68	* ''Series/{{Revolution}}'': The first episode shows this in action. Miles Matheson and [[spoiler:Sebastian Monroe]] are on their way back to their army base when the blackout occurs. Every car on the highway, including theirs, comes to a dead stop.
69	* ''Series/TheStrainTVSeries'': A precursor occurs when Feraldo and her remaining police try to escape the city, at which point they get held up by a traffic jam. They get out and walk and come under attack by Strigoi. Many of the cars have misted over windows indicating that the occupants turned while inside. During the battle, a gas tanker explodes and [[spoiler:only Gus survives.]]
70	* ''Series/TheWalkingDead2010'':
71	** In the pilot, as Rick heads into Atlanta to search for more survivors of the zombie apocalypse, the lanes of the highway heading in are empty except for him and his horse, but the lanes heading out are completely packed with abandoned cars all the way back into the city. As this foreshadows, things in Atlanta are little different from in the suburbs.
72	** More ''Mid''-Apocalypse than Post, but one flashback shows Shane, Lori and Carl stuck in one of these with other survivors, and get front-row seats to the military bombing Atlanta.
73	** After leaving Atlanta, Season 2 has the survivors try to make their way through one of these blocking the highway they're travelling on. While this provides an opportunity to loot the stranded cars for much-needed supplies such as water, food and car parts, it also proves to be very dangerous, as many of the cars former owners are still hanging around, forcing the survivors to split up and hide when a Walker herd forms.
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76	[[folder:Music Videos]]
77	* Music/{{LMFAO}}: The video for "Party Rock Anthem" begins with Redfoo and Skyblu (aka LMFAO) exiting a hospital [[Film/TwentyEightDaysLater 28 days after falling into a coma]] only to find a themselves in a post-apocalyptic street full of abandoned cars [[OurZombiesAreDifferent and dancing zombies]].
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80	[[folder:Video Games]]
81	* ''VideoGame/ArizonaSunshine'': One of the areas you can scavenge for supplies is a street littered with cars.
82	* In ''VideoGame/{{Cataclysm}}'', abandoned cars and other vehicles litter the streets and roads. Most of them are broken, but they can be repaired if you have the right skills and items. You can also loot them for fuel, parts, and whatever items are laying around in them.
83	* ''VideoGame/DeadCounty'' begins with the [[PlayerCharacter delivery man]] being stopped on the highway twice. Once by a downed tree and crashed truck, and the second [[TheJayWalkingDead by a zombie]]. The second time, the engine gets totaled.
84	* ''VideoGame/DeathRoadToCanada'': The "Traffic Jam" text event involves the road being blocked by a sea of rusted-out cars. Your options to get the group through are: abandon the car, take a detour (might work), drive the car offroad (probably won't work), or bench-press a car (makes the bench-presser stronger... but doesn't work).
85	* ''VideoGame/{{Destiny}}'': The roads leading into the Cosmodrome are choked with rusting cars and trucks - all that remains of the people who rushed to escape Earth during the Collapse.
86	* ''Videogame/DyingLight'': Encountered frequently on the highways and bridges during the ZombieApocalypse. It is implied that the former drivers abandon their cars and were killed by the zombies, or became zombies themselves.
87	* ''VideoGame/Fallout3'': A section of highway in the Capital Wasteland features bumper-to-bumper cars, all of which still retain the working nuclear reactors that power each of them, and will explode if they take enough damage. There's also a horde of bandits that roam the highway and will attack you on sight. A fun way to deal with them is to shoot a car on one end and let the chain-reaction of explosions quickly blow up the entire highway with everyone standing on it.
88	* The coast roads in ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' are generally clear of abandoned vehicles save for a large group of them that blocks your path while you have a Combine gunship tailing you, forcing you to leave your car, destroy it, and then punt the vehicles out of your way with the Gravity Gun once you're safe.
89	* "VidoGame/HorizonZeroDawn" and it's sequel, when you find any remaining stretch of pre-apocalypse road, there is usually numerous cars, especially in old traffic tunnels, all but stating that this occurred as people fled the Faro Plague.
90	* ''VideoGame/TheLastOfUs'': Played straight during the opening. Joel, his brother Tommy, and daughter Sarah run into an impassable traffic jam while trying to flee Austin when the infection starts up. Averted during the main story proper, where Joel and Ellie rarely run into this problem in their travels. Even when they get a working truck, they manage to get to Pittsburgh on clear and navigable roads. The one time they ''do'' run into a pile-up of ruined cars, it's a manufactured trap by Scavengers attempting to rob them. Early concept art does show the two having to travel along rows of abandoned cars at one point, but for whatever reason, it was scrapped.
91	* ''VideoGame/Left4Dead2'':
92	** "Dark Carnival", the third campaign, starts with the gang being unable to progress with Jimmy Gibbs's race car through an intense traffic jam caused by people fleeing from Atlanta. The jam forces them to continue on foot and into the [[AmusementParkOfDoom Whispering Oaks Amusement Park]], which was designated an evacuation zone.
93	--->'''Ellis:''' Sorry, folks. This car is capable of miracles, but it can't drive over 20 miles of parked cars. I think we're walkin'.
94	** The final level of "The Parish", the final campaign, has the survivors fight their way through a bridge filled with infected and abandoned cars to reach an evac helicopter.
95	** An easily overlooked instance appears in the second level of "The Sacrifice": the elevated highway bordering the map is crammed with vehicles coming from the direction you're heading in.
96	* ''VideoGame/SpecOpsTheLine'': The first thing Walker and his squad comes across when investigating the sandstorm-wrecked Dubai is a long line of abandoned vehicles leading out of it, some of which have decaying corpses in them. It's immediately apparent that the vehicles are remnants of Colonel Konrad's failed evacuation attempt, which he mentioned in the distress call that necessitated Walker being sent to the city in the first place.
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99	[[folder:Webcomics]]
100	* ''Webcomic/StandStillStaySilent'': Traffic jams like those are sometimes seen while the crew is exploring the abandoned parts of Denmark. As a couple of families from the DistantPrologue are seen escaping ThePlague via leaving densely populated areas to take refuge in isolated places, the owners of those cars are implied to have gotten a similar idea.
101	* The ''Blog/WhatIf'' page [[https://what-if.xkcd.com/8/ "Everybody jump"]] mentions the teleported Earth population trying to spread out by car before they die of thirst and hunger:
102	-->Rhode Island’s half-million cars are commandeered. Moments later, I-95, I-195, and I-295 become the sites of the largest traffic jam in the history of the planet. Most of the cars are engulfed by the crowds, but a lucky few get out and begin wandering the abandoned road network.\
103	Some make it past New York or Boston before running out of fuel. Since the electricity is probably not on at this point, rather than find a working gas pump, it’s easier to just abandon the car and steal the new one.
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106	[[folder:Western Animation]]
107	* In ''WesternAnimation/RickAndMorty'' episode "Rick Potion No. 9", Rick causes an epidemic that turns humans into mutants. At one point, Jerry is blocked off on a highway by a convoy of abandoned cars whose drivers went mutant and ran off.
108	* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': In the ''Treehouse Of Horror'' segment "The Homega Man", Homer is (seemingly) the only survivor of a nuclear war due to inspecting one of Herman's bomb shelters the moment the bombs hit. Humorously, it's not until he gets stuck in one of these that he notices anything even slightly amiss. He even punches the charred remains of Kirk Van Houten hanging out the window of his burned-out car for causing the traffic jam, and only then notices that something seems off.
109	--> '''Homer''': Hey... what's with all the death?
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112	[[folder:Real Life]]
113	* Emergency management officials fear this will become a reality during hurricane evacuations. Some evacuation plans call for opening both sides of interstates/major highways to traffic traveling away from the disaster. South Carolina switched eastbound highways to westbound traffic as part of the Hurricane Dorian evacuations, and a couple of states did likewise during Hurricane Michael in 2018. During Hurricane Floyd in 1999, more than 3 million people tried to evacuate cities along the eastern seaboard, leading to cars stuck in traffic for 10 to 12 hours or more. Fortunately, the hurricane changed course. Had it hit the traffic-clogged interstate, it could have led to this trope, with catastrophic consequences.
114	** A similar example was the "snowpocalypse" that hit Atlanta in 2014. A heavy and somewhat-unexpected snowstorm fell on the city at midday (if Atlanta sees snow at all, it tends to come in the cooler morning or evening hours), which caused most businesses and schools to shut down at roughly the same time so their occupants could get home. But considering how the traffic grid is already heavily stressed on a normal day, dumping the entire city's population plus a hefty dose of snow on the roads all at the same time caused near-instant gridlock. Many people got stuck, running out of gas or simply abandoning their cars to head for the nearest shelter. It took several days to get the roads fully cleared, and in the meantime photos of the city were not so different from many other examples on this page. City officials took a lesson from this and implemented rolling closures for future snowstorms to help prevent a similar situation from occurring again.
115	* During the First Gulf War in 1991, the US Air Force, British RAF, and French Air Force attacked a large convoy of Iraqi vehicles fleeing Kuwait City, destroying as many as 2000 vehicles, either killing the passengers or forcing them to flee into the desert. The news media published photos of the long line of destroyed vehicles, reminiscent of this trope, calling it the "Highway of Death"
116	** This evokes the Falaise Gap fighting of August 1944, when the remains of the German Army in Normandy tried desperately to escape encirclement through a shrinking gap in the enemy lines, seeking to escape eastwards before British and American troops linked up and blocked their route. For several days the clogged roads through Falaise were hammered by Allied fighter-bombers and became a Hell of wrecked vehicles and corpses. To add to German woes, the first Allied soldiers who got to Falaise were neither British nor American but were of the Polish Army - a nation not inclined to be gentle or forgiving to any Germans they met in battle. The Poles were supported by Canadians who were not happy about their first encounters with the Waffen SS, in which Canadian soldiers were murdered rather than taken prisoner. One way or another, not many Germans escaped.
117	* During the process of [[UsefulNotes/HoleInFlag easing of tensions]] between East and West Germany that ultimately concluded with the [[UsefulNotes/TheBerlinRepublic two countries reunifying]], there were abandoned lines of cars leading into West Germany. A lot of people thought that unification would not happen and were trying to get out of East Germany while they still legally could. When the traffic stopped flowing, people abandoned their cars realizing that they would be nearly worthless in West Germany. While not an apocalypse exactly, all this was the result of what was ultimately the downfall of a society.
118	* In order to avoid this trope, survivalist writer Ragnar Benson noted that an easy way of getting out of a city would be by walking along the train tracks (presuming the trains were no longer running, of course).
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Context Main / PostApocalypticTrafficJam