Where would we be without a rat run to beat the traffic at rush hour? Probably at work a lot later, most would say.
But is that right?
A new survey claims using rat-run minor roads, to get around traffic-choked main roads, could be a false economy.
Traffic-information firm TomTom believes these short cuts are actually making us slower because congestion on local roads has also increased dramatically.
Rat-runs fall into two camps: there is the tried and tested one that everyone uses. The problem with that is that it becomes so popular, it develops into a traffic jam in its own right.
The other one is the improvisational route we make up on the spur of the moment.
It’s the one where we invariably get lost, end up back where we started, find ourselves at the back of a traffic jam we were trying to avoid in the first place or realise we were not as clever as we thought we were. Oh, and you are late for work as well.
Spare a thought for long-suffering residents of some sleepy backwater who wake up one day to find what sounds like the A90 has been re-routed past their homes due to some bottleneck elsewhere.
And the problem with many rat-run drivers is that they think they can drive just as fast down these short cuts as they do on a main road. To their mind, that is the whole point of a short cut – to speed through it, however anti-social it might be.
Traffic-calming measures are an antidote to rat running, but TomTom does not believe the practice of building new roads eases rapidly-growing congestion these days.
Some places in the north and north-east, such as Aberdeen, were never given the roads they deserved in the first place – so they will take the new road, thank you very much.