[quote=“AFP”]BEIJING (AFP) – Thousands of vehicles were bogged down Monday in a more than 100-kilometre (62-mile) traffic jam leading to Beijing that has lasted nine days and highlights China’s growing road congestion woes. The Beijing-Tibet expressway slowed to a crawl on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks heading to the capital, and compounded by road maintenance work that began five days later, the Global Times said.
The state-run newspaper said the jam between Beijing and Jining city had given birth to a mini-economy with local merchants capitalising on the stranded drivers’ predicament by selling them water and food at inflated prices.
That stretch of highway linking Beijing with the northern province of Hebei and the Inner Mongolia region has become increasingly prone to massive jams as the capital of more than 20 million people sucks in huge shipments of goods.[/quote]
I love the bolded part. Traffic has stopped moved for four days already. Solution: dig up the road. Sheer genius.
I had the honor last week of being part of this jam albeit at the Tibetan end. Was trying to get to Ganzi from Danba. Absolute madness as there’s thousands of trucks on a road under repair for its entire length and at the same time theres a shit load of tourists out on their summer holiday. Worst bus ride of my life. I rerouted up to Litang (the southern version of the Tibet highway) for the return journey.
God, those are the worst. Especially when they only open the 100+ km stretch of road for part of the day, so you sit there for 5 hours, accumulate a line of 100’s of trucks, buses, tractors, and cars, then are stuck behind all of them, either eating their dust or wallowing in their mud, for the next 8 or 9 hours on the completely torn up road. I am convinced that the people who plan out road repairs in China must either be idiots or hate drivers. I just got back from Sichuan, and I’m still fuming over this one road (under construction of course) we had to go up and back for four straight days where there constant traffic jams purely due to utter stupidity in planning out repairs. So so stupid, I still shudder when I think of that damn road.
Traffic on the road to Tibet must be really hurting now, as both the northern and southern roads from Chengdu have had collapses right at the entrance to the mountains. Fortunately, the southern route has some small roads you can use to make a long detour around, otherwise I might still be sitting there…
God, those are the worst. Especially when they only open the 100+ km stretch of road for part of the day, so you sit there for 5 hours, accumulate a line of 100’s of trucks, buses, tractors, and cars, then are stuck behind all of them, either eating their dust or wallowing in their mud, for the next 8 or 9 hours on the completely torn up road. I am convinced that the people who plan out road repairs in China must either be idiots or hate drivers. I just got back from Sichuan, and I’m still fuming over this one road (under construction of course) we had to go up and back for four straight days where there constant traffic jams purely due to utter stupidity in planning out repairs. So so stupid, I still shudder when I think of that damn road.
Traffic on the road to Tibet must be really hurting now, as both the northern and southern roads from Chengdu have had collapses right at the entrance to the mountains. Fortunately, the southern route has some small roads you can use to make a long detour around, otherwise I might still be sitting there…[/quote]
yeah foreign tourists in chengdu are well few at the moment cos there’s problems in all directions. songpan and jiuzhaigou are especially iffy. we had to take a big but interesting detour to get back to chengdu from kangding. buses were off for 3 days.
