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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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
Here in the United States, we call this phenomenon "Atlanta".
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!
You're being sarcastic, but this used to be true. Rapid changes in China's internal economic policy have created a growing "middle class" whose buying habits are much like those of American consumers. That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world. That's right: China now buys more cars than anybody, and that wasn't true just a few years ago. 33 years ago there were only about a million cars in all of China. There are now four million cars on the streets of Beijing alone, and the Chinese bought 13.6 million cars in 2009. Americans only bought 10.4 million.
Breakfast served all day!
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.
Well, yeah, considering you're stuck in that traffic jam.
Sufficiently advanced libertarianism is indistinguishable from evil.
Learn to love Alaska
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~