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It seems a major traffic jam occurs on the Expressway from Zhangjiakou towards Beijing.
Reportedly vehicles are stuck for 10 days (!!!!!!!!!!) already and no end is in sight.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2010/0...affic-jam.html
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/as...id8s&wom=false
Unthinkable
This is china living the dream!
Every man and woman in a car by 2015!
And people laugh at me for owning/riding a scooter in the city ... my guilty pleasures in having the last laugh as I weave through the insane traffic jams.
I recently read that Beijing has balked at the idea of limiting car ownership in the city. The mindset is that having people buy cars is good for economic development.
The number of cars in Beijing is expected to DOUBLE in the next five years.
Silver lining? Buy real estate with location, location, location ... the charm of sitting in your car for a two hour commute each way will definitely lose the "status luster". My Chinese friends who were early adopters (among the first to buy private cars in Beijing) are looking at ways of getting out of their cars by finding residences next to work/shopping/entertainment/schools, etc.
I was in that - its going on for a long time already but its getting extreme right now.
In the past the reason was that Beijing Muncipality let trucks enter the area only after 10pm, so from 6pm onwards the whole expressway was a queue up of trucks.
It was the first time I turned around on an expressway! There was another expressway some km backwards so I entered that just to find out the same situation there - Ghostdriver again. On the paralell GuoDao the same theater.
Luckily with the GPS I found a small mountain road with barriers to block higher vehicles - took me 3h to figure out the way into Beijing. Normally Zhangjiakou to Beijing should be 2h or less...
The trucks and the management of the toll gates are to blame, road construction might be a minor issue in that.
Wow! And not the first time too! :eekers:
CC