NewOn this holiday week, mainland expressways are anything but fast
Growing numbers of vehicles have turned roads in and around major cities into almost a parking lot, as traffic at one toll booth moved 100 metres in two hours
It’s day one of the National Day week-long holiday on the mainland, and all the train tickets are sold out. The solution, however, is not to jump in the car and drive there, because the road situation looks more like a parking lot.
About 100 million Chinese are on the road this week. Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin have experienced massive traffic jams, both entering and exiting the cities. At the toll booths on the Beijing-Shanghai Expressway, drivers reported having moved only 100 metres in two hours, and Beijing traffic police reported congestion on virtually all the ring roads.
Getting an early start hasn’t seemed to help, either. Drivers who said they left home around 4am were still stuck on the road, Xinhua reported. A Weibo user named Supreme_S said his or her journey from Shanghai to Yancheng, Jiangsu – a distance of 300km – nonetheless took 12 hours.
Peking University’s National Development Research Institute released on Monday the results of a survey it conducted across the country earlier this year. One finding was that the cost of Beijing’s traffic congestion amounts to 70 billion yuan (HK$88 billion) a year. That includes time wasted waiting, petrol consumption and environmental damage.
Traffic jams used to be a problem for only first- and second-tier cities, but it has become a headache for third- and fourth-tier cities, too, as vehicle sales figures across the mainland continue to increase.
Xu Maoting, a white-collar worker who lives in Chengdu, Sichuan, said she rode a commuter bus to Mianyang, 130km away, to visit her parents on Wednesday morning and soon wished she hadn’t. Taking the subway to the bus station was OK, but then the bus joined the traffic jam.