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All drivers, at some time or another, have probably sat in a traffic jam, gnashing their teeth and bemoaning the ‘interminable’ delays. But what do you think constitutes a really bad snarl-up? Perhaps a 10-minute delay? Half an hour? More?
Well, pity these poor Chinese souls, snared in a huge bottleneck on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway earlier this month. Cars from FIFTY lanes of traffic were filtered through a new toll station in Beijing, with far fewer lanes provided on the far side of the booths.
This dramatic funnelling of the flow meant cars were stranded for hours, with occupants seen getting out and wandering between the vehicles, just to pass the time.
At the start of October, China has a week-long celebration to mark the creation of the republic in 1949, and it leads to some epic numbers: around 750 million people were estimated to be travelling during the week, with more than 650 million journeys made by road. The result is this sort of traffic chaos.
So next time you’re stuck in 500 metres of queuing cars because of a set of temporary traffic lights, try to remember that things could be a whole lot worse…