Toronto traffic is no joke, and regularly proves to be enough to prompt motorists to pull all sorts of dangerous stunts to avoid it.

As visitors are out complaining about the state of the city's congestion, local drivers who've had enough are making illegal u-turns, driving off-road and even going the wrong direction on busy highways to escape the all-too-familiar fate of potentially waiting hours in gridlock.

This past weekend, it was a case of the latter on the delay-plagued Gardiner Expressway, where someone in a nearby highrise caught a video of a long line of cars brazenly turning around and backtracking off the highway due to traffic ahead.

Driver’s going backwards on the Bay Street - Gardiner on ramp
byu/GreatBagels intoronto

Whoever performed the risky maneuver first apparently kicked off a trend, with dozens of cars recorded facing backwards on the Bay Street ramp.

"Looks like some drivers are getting too frustrated with the traffic and are turning around using the on-ramp," the filmer wrote on Reddit along with the clip on Saturday in a post that hundreds have commented on and nearly 2,000 have upvoted since.

The footage pans down the ramp to the entrance thoroughfare, showing the snafu the wayward cars were causing once they reached Bay. The camera then goes back up the freeway to the point where eastbound drivers said, "screw it," and bailed via the entrance.

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byu/GreatBagels from discussion
intoronto

Viewers are utterly shocked at the guile of those involved, wondering how the police weren't alerted to the incident and lamenting the lack of consequences for such a wild choice.

"All Toronto needs is two officers at the end of the line handing out tickets for wrong way driving. Cha ching," one person said. " If they thought there was a good chance they'd have licenses suspended and vehicles impounded, then they wouldn't be pulling this sh**," wrote another.

And still another: "This needs to be on news outlets. This is wild disregard for the basic rules of the road."

More called the drivers "selfish" and "insane," saying licences should be revoked in such instances.

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byu/GreatBagels from discussion
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This definitely isn't the only time in recent memory that people have U-turned off a packed artery with no repercussions, though this one didn't involve anyone making their own way in a gap in the median or over a grassy hill.

Given how bad the GTA's bottlenecks can get and that more than half of Ontario drivers willingly admit to breaking the rules of the road, it's not too surprising.