During the Easter long weekend, some friends and I decided to head off to Byron Bay for a fun road trip. Half way through, we got caught in a MASSIVE traffic jam that left us miserable, hungry, and desperate for the loo.
We inched along the highway for over 2 hours, craning our necks out the windows, trying to figure out what caused the back-up. We watched the car's fuel gauge tick perilously close to ‘Empty’.
If I thought that was a bad traffic jam, it's nothing compared to congestion in China.
According to China's Global Times, a traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway – a 62-mile road that goes through the central business district in Beijing – lasted more than eleven days.
That's right. Imagine being stuck in a traffic jam for eleven days. I think I’d go insane.
According to a Financial Times report, Beijing’s traffic management bureau said the monster traffic jam, which is often replicated on a smaller scale throughout the country, is expected to last for nearly a month.
Such circumstances call for creativity. To curb boredom, drivers and passengers of the (mostly) coal-carrying trucks, are killing time playing cards. Locals are hawking food — at ridiculously inflated prices, Reuters reports
Photo credit: Anonymous/AP The Wall Street Journal reported some of the worst commutes are in Beijing and Moscow, where drivers reported 2½-hour delays, on average. The Beijing Transportation Research Center reported that average driving speeds in the capital could drop below 15 km per hour if residents keep buying at current rates of 2,000 new cars a day. At that pace, Beijing will have seven million vehicles by 2015.
