What happens if you compress 50 car lanes to 20? China's "Golden Week," a seven-day public holiday celebrating the country's national day, came to a close on Wednesday. Chinese citizens went back to their hometowns all at the same time.
Traffic after the holidays is always bad. However, China may have just made every driver's nightmare come true. Around 2 p.m. on Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of vehicles going north got stuck on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau (Jinggang'ao) expressway, People's Daily China reported.
Huffington Post reported that according to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing's city traffic monitor said over 125,000 cars entered the city on Tuesday. Some are calling the traffic jam a "carpocalypse," while others are called it "carmageddon." Factories and other businesses were close during Golden Week, and the country's typically polluted skies temporarily turn clear while people travel. This year, about 3.38 million Chinese people visited 125 tourist spots around the country, the Wall Street Journal added.
Besides the foggy weather, the real reason behind the traffic jam is the new checkpoint that forces traffic to merge from 50 lanes down to just 20, according toThe People's Daily. Traffic was reportedly backed up for hours. Many have known that China's traffic jam is always bad, especially on national highways.
In 2010, the road spanning more than 74 miles between the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Beijing had drivers stay on the road for 12 days. During that time the blame fell on everything they can put their fingers on, from road construction to broken down cars and fender-benders. People looked for things to do like playing cards to pass time while vendors took the opportunity to sell food and water at high prices. One driver told the Inner Mongolia Morning Post that if you said 'no' or complained about the prices of the commodities they would threaten to break the windshields of the cars".
In 2012, the government decided to grant free road travel during the same national holiday. However, it turned 24 motorways in 16 provinces into a massive parking lot with more than 85 million people stuck in their cars.