esngblog

From the Daily Telegraph, and probably a very good advert for Chinese railways (although they will be jam packed, too, for the mid-autumn festival.)

If you thought the traffic was bad in the UK, then spare a thought for the poor motorists who were left stranded in this monster jam dubbed the ‘carpocalypse’.  Forget the bank holiday road ‘chaos’ we usually see in Britain, things can get a lot worse in China during their ‘Golden Week’ celebrations.

Thousands of motorists near a toll station in Beijing were left going nowhere fast as people returned home at the end of the week-long National Day holiday.  The nightmare bottleneck was reportedly caused by the combination of a new checkpoint, which sharply reduced the amount of lanes on the motorway from an estimated 50 to 20, and foggy weather.  Drone footage captured the unbelievable traffic gridlock on one of the country’s busiest roads, the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway.

An estimated 750 million people, half the country’s population, were expected to travel on China’s rail and road networks across the seven-day holiday.  Long tailbacks are a recurring theme when the Mid-Autumn festival begins, with major roads being transformed into enormous parking lots for frustrated motorists.  In 2012, there was huge disruption reported when Chinese politicians granted free road travel by suspending motorway tolls.  It was even worse in 2010, when traffic slowed to a snail’s pace along a major Beijing road for nine days.

More than three million tourists visited 125 different locations in China during the first six days of this year’s Golden Week, the Wall Street Journal reports.