Americans who think United States traffic is bad should forget about getting behind the wheel inside china. Bumper-to-bumper traffic stretched for 60 miles on the 10th day of the China traffic jam. The gridlock has clogged a highway between Beijing and Zhangjiakou and is expected to last until road construction in Beijing is finished around the middle of September. The traffic jam moves at a glacial pace. Drivers make headway for about a kilometer a day. Some drivers trapped within the road traffic have not emerged for five days. Demand for coal to feed power plants and China’s emerging consumer society has generated a surge in freight traffic that has been identified as the catalyst for the monumental gridlock.
China’s roadways cannot get caught up with economic climate
Traffic jams are an accepted fact of life for Chinese drivers, however this Beijing road traffic jam is unusually severe. The Wall Street Journal reports that road construction started the traffic jam Aug. 14 in China’s Heibei Province on a major highway leading to Beijing. The usual suspects made things worse. Collisions and stalled automobiles had a snowball effect. Highway officials say the traffic jam could persist for a month since the road project isn’t expected to be finished until then. As more goods are consumed by the capital city’s population of 20 million, congested zones have become a chronic condition.
Coal shipments hit bottleneck
Demand for coal to produce electricity for the world’s fastest-growing economy has been identified as a primary catalyst for the Chinese traffic jam phenomenon. Bloomberg reports that Inner Mongolia, a huge border province northwest of Beijing, surpassed Shanxi province last year to become China’s biggest coal supplier. After a pattern of fatal accidents, the Chinese government closed numerous mines in Shanxi–a province southwest of Beijing with an established railway infrastructure. A rail transport network up to the task of shipping Inner Mongolia’s growing coal production hasn’t yet been built. Suppliers are forced to ship the coal with trucks via Beijing to port cities, where it is shipped to power plants in southern China.
get real life lesson in capitalism
Motorists were resigned to their fates. For probably the most part every person remained calm. NPR reports that road rage has been absent as people killed time by sleeping, taking walks or playing cards and chess. Local villagers, zigzagging between cars on bikes, reaped a windfall selling noodles, box lunches and snacks. The Chinese traffic jam provided an old-fashioned capitalist lesson in supply and demand. Drivers became dependent on the locals for their food and water. Accusations of price-gouging were common. Bottles of water were marked up 1,000 percent. The price of a 3 yuan- (45 cent) cup of instant noodles had more than tripled.
Wall Street Journal
blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2010/08/24/chinese-traffic-jam-stretches-60-miles-ten-days/
Bloomberg
businessweek.com/news/2010-08-24/chinese-demand-for-coal-spurs-9-day-traffic-jam-on-expressway.html
NPR
npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129395326
