Basic Trope: In a scene with ground vehicles, the roads are empty of vehicles aside from the ones involved in the scene, whether they realistically should be or not.
- Played Straight: Bob is either racing with or being chased by Alice, and there is a convenient lack of traffic.
- Exaggerated: The chase is happening on the highway at rush hour, and there are no other vehicles except for Bob's and Alice's.
- Downplayed:
- There is traffic, but not nearly as much as there realistically should be.
- There are plenty of parked vehicles Bob and Alice have to avoid, but no moving traffic.
- Justified:
- The chase is happening at 1:00 in the morning.
- The chase takes place on a remote country road that rarely sees much traffic.
- The chase goes through roads closed for maintenance. note
- The chase goes through roads that are being closed for a sanctioned race* .
- The chase takes place at a time when automobiles weren't nearly as common as they are now, such as the 1930s.
- Alice uses Hollywood Hacking to mess with the traffic grid and send all the cars away from them.
- Inverted: The lack of traffic is inconvenient for Bob because he has no car and needs to steal one to escape Alice, who has a car.
- Subverted: There is no traffic at the start of the chase, but soon Bob and Alice encounter some heavy traffic…
- Double Subverted: …but once they get past that traffic, the roads are once again clear…
- Zig-Zagged: …until they come across more traffic farther down the road.
- Invoked:
- Bob asks his hacker friend to hack traffic lights so he won't have to deal with traffic while fleeing Alice.
- Bob is part of a street gang, and his fellow gang members use their vehicles to block traffic from interfering.
- Bob and Alice are characters in a video game, and whoever set up the race turned the amount of traffic down to zero.
- Defied: Alice has her friend remotely hack dozens of self-driving cars in order to increase the amount of traffic Bob has to deal with.
- Lampshaded: Rick, Bob's passenger, expresses disbelief that there's no traffic on what is normally a busy road.
Back to Conveniently Empty Roads.
