Slide the Tiles Puzzle Game with Cars

Have you ever played the game that has a bunch of plastic tiles with one missing so that you have to manipulate the tiles one at a time to create a certain pattern or move a certain tile to a certain position? I experienced that puzzle in real life with cars in Cairo Egypt.

We were on a traffic circle with 3 or 4 roads entering/leaving the circle. The road we wanted to exit on normally had 2 lanes in each direction. But on this night somehow the 2 inbound lanes had turned into 3, leaving only 1 exiting lane. There was a bottleneck getting out of the circle and consequently no traffic was leaving the circle which meant there was no traffic entering the circle. You can imagine the car horns beeping, right? Finally, some men got out and started playing the tile game with cars and got us moving again. It was really fun to watch.

The thing of it was our friend in Cairo, John, had previously told us about a particularly interesting traffic flow that happens in Cairo. This is the scenario. A train crosses a road that has multiple lanes in both directions. While the train passes, drivers on both sides of the track fill up all lanes on their side of the track. When the train has passed all lanes are full of cars facing each other and no one can go anywhere. After experiencing the tile game with cars I can totally believe that this happens.