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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?
being how they are the first in the world in being green
Nine days?? I think I would walk home. Even if its 50 miles, that could be covered in nine days.I mean holy shit, wtf is the problem over there?
The teachers will crack any minute, purple monkey dishwasher.
Cue the Chinese remake of "Falling Down"...
This must be the first time the Idle category is really apt.
I think I saw this on an episode of Doctor Who.
Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
Why convert from km to miles? TFA says it's over 100km, decidedly imprecise (it's probably not over 110km, but could easily be 104km). The poster converts for us to English measurements with an increased precision, with the implication that, while it's over 62 miles, it's not over 63.
You save only 59 seconds over 8 miles by going 75 instead of 65. Do you really have to pass that guy? Do the Math!
Wouldn't there be cars running out of gas all over the place?
Sounds like the makings for permanent gridlock.
^^vv<><>BA
When the article headline says "over 100km", the conversion -- if one is really required -- should be "over 60 miles".
"The congestion was expected to last into mid-September as the road project will not be finished until then, the newspaper said."
Sounds like they need to build some more railway.
from another article (http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/08/23/china-traffic-jam.html?ref=rss): "Another driver, Wang, told Xinhua he'd been stuck in the traffic jam for three days and two nights."
If you look at traffic jams in Japan at the beginning and end of major holidays (New Year's, Golden Week, O-bon), the expressways around Tokyo usually have jams this long or longer. In the August 5-18 O-Bon holiday, they reported jams of more than 10 km occurring 596 times.
That's what you get when you give most of the people in the country holidays at the same time.
The Great American Traffic Jam More to the point and much funnier, with a stellar b-list cast! The epitome of the 70s car comedies. (Not on DVD? WTF!)
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
For the 3620km inter-province highway, probably not. Cell phones tend not to work outside cities, and Tibet is a very rural area.
Can you imagine how infuriating it must be to see someone leave their blinker on for 9 days?
You've never driven I-95 the length from NYC to Miami, have you?
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.
maybe everyone turns off their engines until the next couple meters opens up. even if someone runs out of gas, it probably would't be hard to keep up by pushing it in neutral.
Wasn't this an episode of Doctor Who a couple of years ago? It turned out some kind of monster had organized the whole thing so it could eat people in the underground tunnels, I think.China should check for monsters.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Here in the United States, we call this phenomenon "Atlanta".
And anyway, they should have said "over 62.13712 miles (approximately)" for even more impressive false precision.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
The traffic jam is 9 days old. That doesn't mean the cars are stuck in there for 9 days. It could be that each car travels through the entire traffic jam in a few hours, but as soon as it's through, another car gets in line at the end.
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.
The rolling traffic jam can be thought of as a queue. Cars are can enter the queue at any rate. However, cars can only leave the queue every 2 seconds. The reason is that if you were stopped behind another car, you wouldn't jam your gas pedal at the exact second the car in front of you does. You would wait until that car moves 20-30 feet before moving your own car. This delay adds up for every car in the queue (let's approximate 2 seconds). So if there were 100 cars in the queue you would need 200 seconds before the last car in the queue moves and essentially eliminating the traffic jam. However, if cars are entering the queue at a rate faster than every 2 seconds, then the queue is growing in size and the traffic jam will never end.
Further details and illustrations:
http://www.smartmotorist.com/traffic-and-safety-guideline/traffic-jams.html
Move the cargo traffic to rail!
The French have them beat...
According to a number of sites, the longest traffic jame ever was from Lyon to Paris on February 16, 1980. The congestion was 176 kilometers long (109 miles). It was caused by many people return from the skiing holidays and bad weather.
If traffic was that slow I would turn of the engine, put her in neutral and push.
No big deal. Park. Walk. Return.
Anything you say will be held against you.
They should have plenty of fuel for that, while idling in traffic does burn up more fuel than driving straight through, I doubt very much that it takes that much more fuel. I think in this day and age it's fairly typical for a vehicle to have enough fuel for several times that distance. Although, if you didn't start in on a full tank of gas, you might be in trouble.
So this jam is about 100km (62 miles) long. At an average human walking pace of 80m/min, that's about 21 hours. I'd rather walk... even with a load on my back.
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.
``Letting people onto a highway that is backed up for 62+ miles is just irresponsible. Then again, this is China. Not that the government is entirely evil, but they don't have a track record of always looking out for their citizens best interests.''
Maybe the government have decided to go libertarian and let people fend for themselves.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
There reason of these traffic jam is that the alternate route has been (half) closed for maintenance.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
That's what usually happens in Naples 2-3 times a day :)
Well, not really, only some kilometers long, but hey, WTF! 100km!!!
...and so there's an easy solution. When wants exceed supply, this is a sign that the price is too low. The market solution is to raise the price until supply and demand equalize.
Sadly, we haven't learned this in America. We prefer to maintain the illusion that freeways are free, even though the market solution would be cheaper in the end.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
That was it really.
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where's the "Tibet" in the "Beijing-Tibet expressway"?
Isn't Tibet over 3000 miles from Beijing?
It's 1,565 mi (2520 km) from Beijing to Tibet.
This road is 2,249 mi (3620 km) long.
Cell phones tend not to work outside cities,
Whilst that may be true for your country, and perhaps China, here in SE England I can get a signal almost anywhere, including rural areas. Unfortunately it's sometimes only Basic GSM and unfortunately not full 3G HSDPA (or sometimes not even GPRS!), but I've yet to find somewhere on a major motorway without a mobile signal.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Sufficiently advanced libertarianism is indistinguishable from evil.
Learn to love Alaska
"The Southern Thruway" is a short story by "Julio Cortazar" that depicts the microeconomy and social interaction of a group of people struck in a days long traffic jam in Paris. He wrote it around 1960-1970.
Sometimes reality turns fiction obsolete....
Something like 3%. it is horrendously expensive for that 3%.
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Something like 3%. it is horrendously expensive for that 3%.
3% of what?
The article says the problem is partly caused by freight being brought into Beijing, although the pictures show mostly cars.
The cost depends what your priorities are, and what you can externalise (railways tend to have far fewer accidents, take up much less land, use much less fuel, create much less pollution etc -- suddenly roads don't seem so cheap).
Anyway, China is building railways -- something like 50% of new railways in the next decade are going to be built in China.
American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars.
Unfortunately, most of the products of the US car industry are insufficiently fuel efficient to meet China's fuel economy standards. This means US cars have to be built as local Chinese/US ventures, which reduces the economic benefits. It's significant then, that the Chinese versions of US cars are able to economically meet and surpass China's fuel efficiency standards (5.7 L/100 Km)... unlike the domestic US versions when have relied on lax US governmental standards (8.7 L/100 Km) as an excuse to build cheaper, less technologically advanced machines. It's sad really - in a way the US's reliance on maintaining older tech standards through Government fiat (under the guise of the "free market") reminds me of how the British Empire stagnated from 1850 to 1914. Secure within the largest trading empire in history, it structured its trade to funnel through the island of Great Britain and protected its domestic firms against external competition and as a result they grew fat and weak and lazy. Outside the British Empire, the emerging powers of the United States and Germany were effectively locked out of this market. As a result, they had to compete by through lower prices and more advanced technology. By the time the UK realised what a situation it had got itself into, the UK balance of trade deficit amounted to 5% of its GDP (even with its economic embargoes), Germany had taken half of Europe and the United States was selling its superior products in every country in the world.
Da Blog
Hire a few of the huge oversupply of men to become toll collectors, parachute them to various points along the road with supplies and plenty of ammo, inform the folks on the road that they can avoid a toll only if they get off the road, and then start randomly picking stopped vehicles, stopped for even a second, to toll. Soon enough the road would clear out. And just think of the money they could donate to the preservation of Tibetan culture! Oh, wait, they'd probably just use the money to widen the road.
NEVER MIND...
Seastead this.
Most of the freeways in southern California have had traffic jams that have lasted for 30 years, so far. That I know of. Possibly longer.
Please go to your world atlas and compare the land area of the SE England with that of the US or China. Think it might be just a tiny bit easier to cover all of SE England with cell towers than all of the US or China?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I live in South East England as well, and yes, I get a cellphone signal almost anywhere in this region. However, while there are lots of green places, it is the 2nd most densely populated part of England after the North West and England is near the top of the population density tables for Europe. If you exclude the city states and micronations, only Holland has a higher population density than England. If you bring in the rest of the UK, then it falls below Belgium in the table.
If you go to for example the Scottish highlands, you don't get a phone signal outside the towns and larger villages, and I suspect if you go to rural Scandinavia especially in the North, you won't find many cell towers. For comparison with China, Tibet is like northern Scandinavia, Beijing is like the South East of England.
There's not a guy in Tiananmen Square standing in front of the line of cars, is there?
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~
Array? Array?
He's Chinese, not Elmer fucking Fudd!
Ignolant plick!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
Specificaly, Ashram Chowk. It sees long jams, lasting few hours when it rains, and slow moving traffic when it does not rain. A week ago, when heavy rains hit Delhi, this picture was flashed over the news channels(which do not have nothing much to report anyway).
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
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Asian traffic jams, they'll typically turn off the engine once they've been there for a while. Trying to get through Bangkok at about 4 PM is a nightmare. It took 15 minutes to drive the 25 KM from the airport and 30 minutes to get the 5 KM from the toll-way to my hotel. Feck if I had of known I would have walked it from the off ramp.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You missed my point - it's not just city\not city for mobile reception, but population density comes into it as well. I suspect that China has a high enough population density so that the drivers would get signal all the way.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
That was kind of my point; I suspect that even rural China has a high population density along major routes, so phone signal shouldn't be a problem.
Off topic, with the regular stories of "unprepared person rescued after texting friend\posting to facebook" and so on, I'm surprised that the Highlands have low signal coverage - it seems like everyone is sending messages from them; on an even more off-topic but related note, I once sent an email from a village halfway up the foothills of the Himalayas, admittedly from an internet cafe, but still, 'net connections are everywhere now (even if it was really slow).
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
TunedIT and TomTom created a data mining competition to solve the traffic problem-> see:http://tunedit.org/challenge/IEEE-ICDM-2010
...can be a real bitch, especially when everyone wants to drive a car.
Bibo Ergo Sum.
That's 62 miles, or 100km. I can't recall hearing about a 100km jam in the 11 years I've been here, though I'll grant you a few 50-60km jams pop up on the news most holiday seasons.
The population density in the US and China is not evenly distributed. However, it is relatively easy to ensure cell reception along major highways, so I would expect both US and China to do that rather well.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Well said!
So this traffic jam is like a water dam. Individual cars come and go but the total mass appears constant.