They said when the earthquakes happened that the real effects would be years ahead. If driving behaviors are anything to go by, I think the stress is starting to peak. Christchurch is largely functional again now, but there are a lot of donkeys on the edge these days. I've seen people start GTA V style shenanigans on the road, weaving wildly and hanging out the windows and going off at other people because of stress. The East is a clusterfuck because roadworks have been nearly perpetual for three years, and it gets really fucking tiring having your way to and from work blockaded in some new configuration every single day.

The traffic is insane. Shitloads of trucks, who occasionally murder cyclists and run into cars because they change lanes without looking, stressed drivers who pull out randomly, fishtail across lanes and chase other motorists down. You can see cops pulling people over almost constantly out East because people have just started doing the most insane random stuff through roadworks, because they're tired of them.

There's a lot of rebuild fatigue, a lot of broken communities, a lot of inconvenience and probably lingering fear too. You have to remember, the quakes were not a one-off event, they were months of repeated trauma, with significant shocks occurring multiple times throughout the day in the early months. And I'm sure it's not over, because you have to account for the fact that a lot of kids lived through all that, and their trauma is likely going unadressed in a lot of cases.

Christchurch is full of people who lived through all of that and are almost certainly fried on one level or another. It's a weird time, and a weird place.