A nine-day traffic jam in China is now more than 100 kilometres long and could last for weeks, state media reported Monday. Thousands of trucks en route to Beijing from Huai’an in the southeast have been backed up since Aug. 14, making the National Expressway 100 impassable, Xinhua News reported.
A spokesman for the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau reportedly told China’s Global Times newspaper that the backup was due to “insufficient traffic capacity … caused by maintenance construction.” The construction is scheduled to last until Sept. 13. Stranded drivers appear to have few options when it comes to dealing with the jam.
At least some drivers have complained that roadside vendors have increased their prices to take advantage of the traffic jam. One truck driver said he bought instant noodles from one vendor for four times the original price. Another driver, Wang, told Xinhua he’d been stuck in the traffic jam for three days and two nights. “We are advised to take detours, but I would rather stay here since I will travel more distance and increase my costs,” Wang said. This is not the first time the highway has faced such congestion.
A similar backup in July kept traffic to a crawl for nearly a month, Xinhua reported.
This is insane! What are they doing, passing out Pampers along the way like their trains? I won’t even go to a movie if the line has more than 10 people in it. Sheesh!
This has urban legend written all over it.
Wow….that looks more screwed up than a….Chinese traffic jam!
It’s simple, Big trucks can’t drive through beijing during the day, I think they can drive on the outer highways I don’t recall.
Getting the shipment tomorrow, will cost X, waiting 4 weeks, and getting the shipment LATE, will cost X-.50 cents, therefore, in a Chinese person’s eye, it’s better to let the guy sit in traffic and pay for food mainly out of his own empty pocket, then spend one dollar, and get the shipment now.
The tolls in Beijing are killer, 10-20 USD sometimes, so going around is going to cost $50, as opposed to a day of meals maby 2-3 dollars, so if you have $5 in your pocket it makes sense, and the employers wont pay for tolls like that. Chinese people will do anything to save one penny, I’ve seen it time and time again.
They don’t use diapers, in China it’s OK to piss everywhere. Kids wear ass-less chaps so they can take a dump in the street. I had a child almost pee on my Nike’s.I saw a kid squatting in the parking lot of a major phone company, and he was so stubborn in his squat he almost got ran over as a van slowly backed over him. The poor van ended up parking in the poop.
So this isn’t a traffic jam, it’s more like stubborn ass people who wanna scrape every penny they can lining up to save (in the end) two dollars.
Those two dollars will pay for one beer for a boss, so of course the boss wants to save it. China is so messed up.