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By ANITA CHANG, Associated Press Writer Anita Chang, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 24, 8:37 pm ET
BEIJING China has just been declared the world's second biggest economy, and
now it has a monster traffic jam to match.
Triggered by road construction, the snarl-up began 10 days ago and was 100
kilometers (60 miles) long at one point. Reaching almost to the outskirts of
Beijing, traffic still creeps along in fits and starts, and the crisis could
last for another three weeks, authorities say.
It's a metaphor for a nation that sometimes chokes on its own breakneck growth.
In the worst-hit stretches of the road in northern China, drivers pass the time
sitting in the shade of their immobilized trucks, playing cards, sleeping on
the asphalt or bargaining with price-gouging food vendors. Many of the trucks
that carry fruit and vegetables are unrefrigerated, and the cargoes are assumed
to be rotting.
On Sunday, the eighth day of the near-standstill, trucks moved just over a
kilometer (less than a mile) on the worst section, said Zhang Minghai, a
traffic director in Zhangjiakou, a city about 150 kilometers (90 miles)
northwest of Beijing. China Central Television reported Tuesday that some
vehicles had been stuck for five days.
No portable toilets were set up along the highway, leaving only two apparent
options hike to a service area or into the fields.
But there were no reports of violent road rage, and the main complaint heard
from drivers was about villagers on bicycles making a killing selling boxed
lunches, bottled water to drink and heated water for noodles.
A bottle of water was selling for 10 yuan ($1.50), 10 times the normal price,
Chinese media reports said.
Click image to see photos of the huge traffic jam
AP
The traffic jam built up on the Beijing-Tibet highway, on a section that links
the capital to the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia. The main reason traffic
has increased on this partially four-lane highway is the opening of coal mines
in the northwest, vital for the booming economy that this month surpassed
Japan's in size and is now second only to America's.
Although wages remain generally low, auto ownership and gridlock have grown so
commonplace that Inner Mongolia authorities restrict cars' movement to
alternate days, based on odd or even numbers in their license plates.
The car invasion is widely felt; Guo Jifu, head of the Beijing Transportation
Research Center, told a symposium Monday that vehicles on Beijing's roads
multiplied by 1,900 per day on average in the first half of this year, Xinhua,
the official news agency, reported.
The immediate cause of the traffic jam that began Aug. 14 is construction on
one of three southbound highways feeding into Beijing.
Authorities are trying to ease the snarl-up by letting more trucks into the
capital, especially at night, said Zhang, the traffic director. They also asked
trucking companies to suspend operations and advised drivers to take the few
alternate routes available.
"Things are getting better and better," he said, but he added that the
construction would go on until Sept. 17.
Alan Pisarski, author of "Commuting in America," said the worst traffic jams in
U.S. history tend to be associated with natural disasters, such as people
fleeing Hurricane Katrina or the collapse of the upper deck of a freeway in
Oakland, Calif., in the 1989 earthquake.
"It took some people days to get home after that one," Pisarski said.
Traffic arrangements built up over generations in the U.S. are lacking in much
of China, said Bob Honea, director of the University of Kansas Transportation
Research Institute, who has visited China.
"We'll see this problem more and more often. It's true of every developing
country," he said.
Honea said the U.S. has never experienced a traffic jam as big as the one now
bedeviling northern China, but he noted that traffic in Los Angeles "is pretty
bad. It's not a highway, it's a parking lot."