China's Nine-Day Traffic Jam Tops 62 Miles 198
A traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet expressway has now entered its ninth day and has grown to over 62 miles in length. This mother-of-all delays has even spawned its own micro-economy of local merchants selling water and food at inflated prices to stranded drivers. Can you imagine how infuriating it must be to see someone leave their blinker on for 9 days?
Re:Holy crap! (Score:5, Informative)
False precision (Score:4, Informative)
Why convert from km to miles? TFA says it's over 100km, decidedly imprecise (it's probably not over 110km, but could easily be 104km). The poster converts for us to English measurements with an increased precision, with the implication that, while it's over 62 miles, it's not over 63.
Significant figures (Score:3, Informative)
When the article headline says "over 100km", the conversion -- if one is really required -- should be "over 60 miles".
"The congestion was expected to last into mid-September as the road project will not be finished until then, the newspaper said."
Sounds like they need to build some more railway.
some people stay there for a long time... (Score:5, Informative)
For length, not so special (Score:5, Informative)
If you look at traffic jams in Japan at the beginning and end of major holidays (New Year's, Golden Week, O-bon), the expressways around Tokyo usually have jams this long or longer. In the August 5-18 O-Bon holiday, they reported jams of more than 10 km occurring 596 times.
That's what you get when you give most of the people in the country holidays at the same time.
I say nay nay! (Score:3, Informative)
.
Re:Holy crap! (Score:3, Informative)
BINGO!
In my county, "rush hour" lasts 5 hours each direction, but few individual cars are in the mire for more than 90 minutes,
Re:i thought they all rode bikes in China (Score:5, Informative)
You're being sarcastic, but this used to be true. Rapid changes in China's internal economic policy have created a growing "middle class" whose buying habits are much like those of American consumers. That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world. That's right: China now buys more cars than anybody, and that wasn't true just a few years ago. 33 years ago there were only about a million cars in all of China. There are now four million cars on the streets of Beijing alone, and the Chinese bought 13.6 million cars in 2009. Americans only bought 10.4 million.
Re:i thought they all rode bikes in China (Score:1, Informative)
There are also places where once ubiquitous bicycles are banned because they "impede traffic flow". Too bad for the giant traffic jams created through stupid planning (ie. thinking bikes were causing congestion, idea of one car per person) and 1950s mentality (car is a status symbol). Now instead of China avoiding the shit that US and must of western has w.r.t. oil dependence, carbon footprint and overall sustainability of their economy, they are repeating it! But there will be nothing like subsidized gasoline - what could possibly go wrong??
http://www.forbes.com/2008/05/27/gas-inflation-china-oped-cx_dhs_0528oilchina.html
2008 - "Gasoline in the U.S. now sells for around $4 per gallon, but it sells for $2.49 per gallon in China."
Now if India would only buy as many cars....
Re:Holy crap! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Move the cargo traffic to rail! (Score:3, Informative)
A big rig causes 9,600 [jsonline.com] times as much road wear as a car, but doesn't pay 9,600 times as much in taxes. So a simple solution is to make them pay the full cost, based on the weight of the vehicle and the number of axles.
Faced with paying the full cost of transporting goods, the shipping companies will use rail more often, and that will reduce traffic congestion and save us money on repairing the roads.
Re:Shut Down Access? (Score:3, Informative)