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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?

5 of 198 comments (clear)

  1. Idle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    This must be the first time the Idle category is really apt.

  2. Re:Holy crap! by operagost · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not that every vehicle has been stuck in there for nine days: it's that the traffic has been crawling for nine days. Usually a traffic jam clears out at a later hour, but volume is too high even at night.

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    Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
  3. Call the Doctor! by Ambiguous+Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I think I saw this on an episode of Doctor Who.

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    Their may be a grammatical error, misspeling, or evn a typo in this post.
  4. some people stay there for a long time... by jarkus4 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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."

  5. Not Doctor Who - Omni Magazine, 1979 by RobertB-DC · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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