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West Carleton-March Coun. Eli El-Chantiry is talking hands-free from his car, where he swears he spends half his life.

“This last week, honest to God, there are just more and more cars on the road,” he said one day last week, an unexpected observation since I called about an entirely different topic.

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But he felt the need to unburden. “It doesn’t matter what time I leave (Carp) in the morning, 6 o’clock even, and it still takes an hour or more to get into the city.”

The day before, a reporter walked by my desk with another traffic lament. She left her Kanata home at 8 a.m. for a 9 a.m. court case. She got to Elgin Street at 9:40 and missed everything.

Kanata-to-Ottawa in 100 minutes? How did things get this bad?

We see this every morning outside our offices on Baxter Road, which overlook the Queensway: gridlock, gridlock, gridlock, nothing but brake lights and inching rubber. Dear daily driver, how have you not lost your mind?