Traffic after the holidays tend to be pretty awful. But China may have just turned every driver’s worst nightmare into reality as hundreds of millions of people headed home at the end of a Golden Week, a week-long national holiday.
Thousands of motorists found themselves stranded on Tuesday in what looks from above like a 50-lane parking lot on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway, one of the country’s busiest roads. Some are dubbing the traffic jam a “carpocalypse,” while others are calling it “carmageddon.”
Though foggy weather may have played a role, the real culprit is a new checkpoint that forces traffic to merge from 50 lanes down to just 20, according to The People’s Daily. Traffic was reportedly backed up for hours.
China is no stranger to these ridiculous traffic jams, especially on national highways. In 2010, gridlock spanning more than 74 miles on the stretch between the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Beijing left drivers with nowhere to go for a staggering 12 days. That time blame fell on everything from road construction to broken down cars and fender-benders.
People played cards to pass the time while nearby vendors took the opportunity to sell food and water at premium prices. “If you said ‘no’ or complained about the price they threaten to break your [wind]shields,” one driver told the Inner Mongolia Morning Post.
In 2012, the government’s decision to grant free road travel during the same national holiday turned 24 motorways in 16 provinces into a massive parking lot with more than 85 million people stuck in their cars.
Though foggy weather may have played a role, the real culprit is a new checkpoint that forces traffic to merge from 50 lanes down to just 20, according to The People’s Daily. Traffic was reportedly backed up for hours.
Though foggy weather may have played a role, the real culprit is a new checkpoint that forces traffic to merge from 50 lanes down to just 20, according to The People’s Daily. Traffic was reportedly backed up for hours.
LOL because people can't even handle going from 3 lanes to 2 without backing shit up for miles.
Though foggy weather may have played a role, the real culprit is a new checkpoint that forces traffic to merge from 50 lanes down to just 20, according to The People’s Daily. Traffic was reportedly backed up for hours.
I wonder why they decided that just adding more lanes was more worthwhile than building more infrastructure to alleviate that traffic.
Ok, This is now sapping the productivity of my entire department. I need somebody who can read Chinese to click through to some of those links in the original story and find out where exactly this photo was taken because we want to see WHY they would design this in such a way. I've found the highway in question on Google earth, but it winds through half the giant damn country and I can't find a section that wide.
But I am pretty confident that they aren't totally insane...they didn't build 50 TRAVEL lanes. They built 50 toll/checkpoint lanes to increase their processing capacity. The problem is (and you can see this in the PIPed picture) is that they left the old smaller checkpoint in the way of the merge. Which is bizarre. It looks like the actual highway in question is a totally normal super-highway. Somewhere in the realm of 5-8 lanes each direction. Not 20. And definitely not 50.
Of course the western world would avoid this issue by just not having random government checkpoints and using EZPass for tolls....
I wonder why they decided that just adding more lanes was more worthwhile than building more infrastructure to alleviate that traffic.
Ok, This is now sapping the productivity of my entire department. I need somebody who can read Chinese to click through to some of those links in the original story and find out where exactly this photo was taken because we want to see WHY they would design this in such a way.
The story says near Beijing, so I'd start google earthing there.
Ok, This is now sapping the productivity of my entire department. I need somebody who can read Chinese to click through to some of those links in the original story and find out where exactly this photo was taken because we want to see WHY they would design this in such a way.
The story says near Beijing, so I'd start google earthing there.
I did. can't find it. They also said it's new though, so it might not be in the aerial in it's current configuration.
This is giving me horrible flashbacks to driving during Chinese New Year when we were living in KL. It took several hours to go a few miles because for some reason everyone had to stop at one specific rest stop and had parked on the highway to do it once the off ramp was jammed. The only functioning "lane" was the far right shoulder. The rest had literally been converted into a parking lot.