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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?
I really miss Omni Magazine from the late '70s and early '80s, with its bold predictions of the Brave New World coming in the then-distant New Millenium. One of my favorite stories was The Great Moveway Jam, a dystopian story of a traffic jam started by a little old lady who put on her left blinker, but turned right.
The story was based in California, 1998-9 -- but China in 2010 makes a lot more sense. Especially since the solution to the jam, which extended "from San Diego to Santa Barbara, and... seventy-nine miles inland", involved building a wall to prevent "jamees" from abandoning their immobile vehicles, and a Final Solution that involved a lot of helicopters, a *whole* lot of cement, and airdropped suicide pills.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
This jam sounds like something out of a William Gibson novel. Kwan Xiahacker is 19 years old, and makes a living providing computer security to the residents of the Beijing-Tibet expressway trafficjam, where he was born.
Move the cargo traffic to rail!
It was the 2007 Doctor Who episode Grid Lock where in the year 5 billion and 53 the traffic in New New York was so bad it took 6 years to travel 10 miles in the high occupancy lane.
Reminds me of the party in Hitchhiker's Guide that lasted for generations.