bagwell

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.



http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/...m_source=yahoo

ALewIS250

This is insane to me! I get pissed off if I am going less than 10 under for more than a couple minutes. Those in Cali, NY and similar have me laughing when I see videos of stopped traffic. makes me cringe a bit.

side note: are the emissions from these why the air is so terrible?

4TehNguyen

iTrader: (1)

what the heck is up with that bottleneck after the toll plaza?

RXSF

LOL they put a building right after the toll plaza and force everyone to the left? In any case, this needs a whole overhaul. slowly reduce the number of lanes miles out from the toll plaza and then create some sort of metering light system

mmarshall

And, if you believe the stats, half of those vehicles are Buicks LOL.

Heck, the old men in Beijing running the country don't care about traffic jams. They have state-run helicopters, trains, and aircraft that take them anywhere they need to go. They don't have to answer to the general public (China doesn't have free elections, and still is technically run by its Communist Party even though the economy is generally capitalist). The only people that Chinese government officials have to answer to are their own cronies, who can, and sometimes do, remove certain officials from power.

rogerh00

Not far from trying to get over the Peace Bridge to Canada on July 4th

bagwell

I was just amazed at the 50 lane freeway

Sulu

Why are so many Americans trying to leave the country to come up here on your Independence Day?

It is not a 50-lane freeway. It is a freeway opening up to 50 individual tollbooth lanes then narrrowing back down after the tollbooths.

Hoovey689

iTrader: (16)

White cars and black cars are abundant

FrankReynoldsCPA

There's a couple of green ones in the mix.

rominl

iTrader: (4)

importance of infrastructure

SNiiP3R

iTrader: (3)

Perfect example of bad design. How can you merge so many lanes at once like that? Who even came up with an idea?

chikoo

Perfect example of lack of harmony between teams. The tollbooth team designed 50 tollbooths to alleviate traffic at the tollbooth. It doesn't matter how the road team planned the roads

rxonmymind

This is why automakers want self driving cars. Imagine THAT up there can be improved by 75% by taking the human factors out of the driving equation. I can't even wrap my head around that and not likely will I live long enough to see it. I would LOVE to though. Once that technology matures in say 50 years of bullet proof accident free self driving cars they'll outlaw people manually driving cars. Unless you get a special permit costing $$$$.
The next logical step in roughly 80 years will be flying cars then governments around the world will rejoice as they will no longer need to spend money on roads & bridges. Politicians will be more than happy to spend a free trillion or so on other frivolous projects.
I wish I could be around to see the next 150 years.

Superes350

Indeed, it is greatly amusing how it's the human factor that causes the traffic. We are some competitive that we cause issues that cause ripple effects that eventually cause traffic. If we weren't a bunch of ******* behind the wheel, and this applies to all of us, we wouldn't deal with traffic unless there is a major incident that impedes the road. Even then, it would still flow much better than it currently does.