China becomes world traffic jam champion (News Feature)

By Andreas Landwehr Aug 25, 2010, 18:19 GMT

Beijing - 'He who lacks patience won't reach his destination,' the Chinese say. And they would know. For almost two weeks now, vehicles have been backed up on an expressway northwest of Beijing. The gridlock stretches about 100 kilometres.

The world's most populous nation at 1.3 billion, China overtook Japan in the second quarter as the second-largest economy after the United States and may have reached yet another milestone, albeit a dubious one: the land of the longest traffic jams.

Chinese lorry drivers' patience is being put to a tough test. Congestion is especially heavy on the G110 motorway and Beijing-Tibet Expressway between Huai'an in Hebei Province and Xinghe in Inner Mongolia.

'All I can do is wait,' one driver told state media. 'It's really bad. The expressway is blocked and so is the motorway,' complained another.

Said a driver's wife, along for the ride with the couple's two small children: 'I'm really worried about the hygiene situation and whether our food is safe to eat.'

Toilets are lacking. 'Everybody simply goes to the side of the road - we've all got used to it,' remarked a driver from Shandong Province.

When they are moving at all, lorries have reportedly been making merely a few hundred metres a day. State media, ever keen on positive news, said Wednesday that traffic was gradually unsnarling. To what degree was unclear because an end to the mega-jam is not really in sight.

Roadworks, cited as one reason for the tailback, will not be finished for three weeks at the earliest. Also to blame are increased coal deliveries from mines in Inner Mongolia. August is traditionally the month when filling coal stores for the harsh winter begins.

Inner Mongolia, northwest of Beijing, became China's primary coal source last year after a spate of accidents prompted closure of numerous mines in Shanxi Province for safety reasons.

Since the railway's capacity to transport coal is limited, more and more coal-carrying lorries are rolling these days to Beijing and beyond - the port cities of Qinhuangdao, Tianjin und Caofeidian, near Tangshan.

The road network cannot absorb all the traffic, so tie-ups lasting days have been common for some time now. Lines of lorries bound for Beijing, home to 17 million people, regularly get caught in jams outside the capital that stretch for many kilometres because they are required to make deliveries only at night.

A snarl-up similar in size to the current one was reported to have paralyzed the Beijing-Tibet Expressway for four weeks last month.

Once again, drivers crouch in the summer heat beside their vehicles and kill time by playing cards. Or they crawl under them and sleep. And they get angry at ruthlessly enterprising villagers who capitalize on their predicament by selling them instant noodles, low-quality sausages, fruit and just plain water at highly inflated prices.

'I brought instant noodles with me but don't have hot water to pour on them,' a coal lorry driver from Hohot, in Inner Mongolia, said in an interview. 'The hot water they're selling costs five yuan (about 70 U.S. cents).' The man's travel costs are rising rapidly.

About 400 policemen are said to have been dispatched to the scene to maintain order. Some stranded vehicles have been targeted by bandits. 'Eight robbers attacked six lorries and cars one night and fled with a total of 60,000 yuan,' the wife of a robbed driver told the newspaper Beijing Chenbao.

China's highway gridlock is just part of a gigantic traffic problem. More cars are sold there today than anywhere else, so Chinese cities are badly snarled, too. Nationwide auto sales rose by 45 per cent in 2009. There are more than 2,000 new registrations every day in Beijing alone.

To help ease congestion somewhat, Beijing motorists are required to leave their car at home one day a week depending on the licence plate number. Nevertheless, if newspapers in the city are to be believed, the level of suffering by Beijing commuters is the highest in the world.

'Nowhere are traffic jams worse,' they headlines said.