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China's Nine-Day Traffic Jam Tops 62 Miles
A traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet expressway has now entered its ninth day and has grown to over 62 miles in length. This mother-of-all delays has even spawned its own micro-economy of local merchants selling water and food at inflated prices to stranded drivers. Can you imagine how infuriating it must be to see someone leave their blinker on for 9 days?
The whole journey is 3620km long, and takes about 3 days to drive in normal traffic. Traffic is getting through, it is just running slowly because of road works to widen the road. The delays have been going on for 9 days, but that doesn't mean it is the same cars as 9 days ago.
Why is this modded insightful? It isn't. You are thinking about this from the perspective of what would happen in the US, and China is not the same. Obviously the poster and the mods have never spent much time in China.
There are more people here that you can imagine. The infrastructure cannot keep up with the population growth. In this particular area, the only alternate road is under construction. Look at a map. It would take an extra 9 hours at least if you take an alternate route, and that is provided you can get off the highway, turn around, and go back.
The government does it's best to control the traffic, but the number of people with cars is growing faster than they can keep up. In Beijing, you can only drive your car in the city 4 days a week. (Everyone has 1 day they are not allowed to drive, and it rotates.) Traffic is still horrible, even with 1/5 of the cars parked at home every day.
It is a major throughfare connecting to the capital city. You cannot just "close access" to the entire highway for a 60 mile stretch. You would essentially be cutting off all of those rural communities from the rest of the country for the entire summer until the construction projects are complete.
It just isn't feasible.
cars are simply unable to move once on the ramp causing people to do u-turns, etc, which causes its own hazards...
This confirms my suspicion what you have no idea what traffic is like in China. This (cars unable to move, illegal u-turns causing hazards, etc) happens all the time on a normal day here. The drivers are used to it, and they drive under the assumption that most people don't follow the rules.
I realize that someone who has never left the US might not understand, and the gut reaction might be "OMG, look how uncivilized China is!" but that is just your ignorance showing through. The American media doesn't help, because (on some level) the powers that be want us to think that about China, so that is the national image of the PRC that is repeated over and over in the West.
BTW, I was in Vermont during the Phish concert mentioned here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phish_festivals#Coventry
The US isn't any better at handling the traffic situation. I don't recall them closing the highway in Vermont when this happened.
~A~