50 lane road in china. Paths of the Heavenly. How are the roads in China. History of traffic jams

Almost every large, densely populated city suffers from traffic jams. The largest congestion occurs in metropolitan areas such as Bangkok, Beijing, Sao Paulo, Los Angeles and Washington. There, people often have to allocate several hours a day just for movement. Even the average American in a small town spends almost an entire working week in year. Because the roads are heavily congested, even minor traffic obstructions can lead to huge traffic jams. This is exactly what happened in 2010, when a 100-kilometer-long 12-day traffic jam formed in Beijing due to roadworks.

This mega traffic jam sprawled along China National Highway 110. Ironically, it was created by road works aimed at combating traffic jams. However, Beijing's congested streets couldn't handle even that. Large maintenance trucks and the roadwork itself quickly brought traffic to a halt. The situation was aggravated by the fact that the cars were overheating. All this forced motorists to stand on the road for days ...

Of course, no matter how difficult the situation, there will always be those who will find a way to profit from it. Taking advantage of the opportunity, vendors offered instant noodles, other food, water and cigarettes to stranded drivers at prices 10 times higher than usual. Those who refused to buy were sometimes threatened with damage to the car. There were many cases when money was stolen from cars and gas was "siphoned". However, everything was relatively calm, as 400 police officers were called in to patrol the roads.

The cork dragged on for almost two weeks. Cars moved extremely slowly - 3 km a day. The people in the cars were playing cards, chess, or just taking a nap. While most of us would never voluntarily enter such a traffic jam, some truckers deliberately took this busy route (even though they could have avoided it). They wanted to spend as much time on the road as possible so that they could raise prices later. Obviously, this did not help the situation.

Surprisingly, the cork disappeared on the 12th day. This turned out to be less than some officials had predicted. Apparently, the local authorities suddenly dispersed the cluster of cars, and they began to move at their usual speed.

By the way, although Beijing had the longest traffic jam, the record for the length of the traffic jam (in terms of distance) belongs to the Brazilian city of São Paulo. There are regular traffic jams up to 295 kilometers long!

Endless road queues are much worse than the store ones. Drivers, standing idle for hours in traffic jams, become furious. Some of them already come up with various activities for themselves, what they can do on the road. Some are reading, girls are knitting, many are talking on the phone, playing games over the Internet, or just picking their noses, waiting for their time. All traffic jams arise due to the fact that the number of car owners is growing. In megacities, in general, many kilometers of congestion are formed.

The biggest traffic jam in the world

In Washington in 1969 there was a rock festival. He then served as the reason for the formation of a multi-kilometer traffic jam. At least 500,000 young people came to the Woodstock festival by car. As a result, a queue or traffic jam formed 32 km away.

This year, the city was hit by the strongest hurricane in history. The inhabitants were warned and, greatly frightened, rushed to run away. And everyone got into the car and drove to the 5th highway. As a result, a traffic jam was formed in 160 km.

On the road, a multi-kilometer traffic jam was formed due to bad weather conditions. Many residents went out of town for the weekend to their dachas, and upon returning back they were in for a surprise. Due to bad weather, a line of 175 km was formed.

A traffic jam of 292 kilometers is a completely new record. In Sao Paulo, this is the biggest traffic jam in history.

This year is marked for China by the creation of the largest traffic jam. It was formed on August 11 and only on August 25 the congestion significantly decreased. For 2 weeks, motorists were so tired, they wanted to eat, drink and sleep. But street vendors could afford such a cork: they organized food trade, sold water, and at inflated prices by 2 times.

Beijing is surrounded by 6 ring roads. And still not enough space! Congestion is formed every year, and Beijing is the first in the world in the formation of traffic jams. In the Chinese capital, they cannot regulate the number of purchased cars in any way, so traffic jams are inevitable.

Old, uneven and narrow streets lead to annual traffic jams in Mexico City. Protests are very often held in Mexico City, which leads to the formation of kilometer-long traffic jams.

Every day, every hour, thousands of cars get into big traffic jams. Local residents are already used to traffic jams and are completely normal about it. Drivers calculate the time and leave the house a few hours earlier so as not to be late for a meeting or work due to traffic jams.

There was a traffic jam on 50 lanes. The fact is that Chinese motorists, having successfully celebrated the National Day of China, which lasts 7 days, put their family in a car and drove home. It was not specified how many families and how many hours it took to leave the city.

Every day, on the streets of the house, cars are idle in traffic jams. During this time, up to 500,000,000 liters of fuel are burned. Naturally, the atmosphere is polluted by exhaust gases.

The formation of huge car flows is influenced by 2 factors: weather conditions, the human factor. In addition to the ranking of the largest traffic jams in the world, you can also share their duration. A person loses a lot of time on the road. In Manchester, the traffic jam lasted 72 hours, which is 3 days. The second longest traffic jam occurred in Paris. Motorists stood in a traffic jam for more than 70 hours. Next comes Cologne - a 57-hour traffic jam.

Foreigners are not allowed to drive in China. But if you really want to, then you can illegally.

My friend and I traveled around the Celestial Empire by car, and drove 13 thousand kilometers.

I want to show how the roads in China are arranged and why they will soon overtake America.

1 Five years ago I traveled in the USA. It was a huge two-month route, alone behind the wheel, I drove 20 thousand kilometers, from Detroit to Detroit. I spent long hours behind the steering wheel, studying the arrangement of roads, exits, highway numbering and watching the behavior of drivers.
Then there was a big report. It seemed to me that the United States had the best roads in the world, but how else could it be in a country with such distances?

2 In China, they are even larger. Well, what about the roads? If in the USA they are sung in cinema and music, the legendary Route 66 alone is worth something, then what is in China remains a mystery even to most tourists who come to the country. Here's what I'll say - they have not just caught up, but have already surpassed America and the rest of the world. Where others cut tunnels in the rocks, the Chinese put piles. Dozens and hundreds of kilometers of roads on concrete pillars. Sometimes the trails run right along the riverbed.

3 China is a country of advanced development. Have you seen their ghost towns? I myself am talking about how entire million-plus cities stand empty waiting for tenants who may arrive in ten years. But the Chinese are doing it now, because they can now, and then - it is not known. It's the same with roads. This photo was taken in the foothills of Tibet, where there are a couple of hundred inhabitants in two villages, and they ride donkeys. But the road was built, also with lanterns and a wide sidewalk!

4 The most complex interchanges, grandiose engineering structures, all this delights!

5 We traveled for almost a month. Every day we spent six to twelve hours behind the wheel. And almost everywhere there were excellent highways. And where it was not, they were built there at that very moment. Large-scale road construction has been launched in the most remote areas. No one knows about it, does not write or talk about it, because it is not available to foreigners.

6 To drive legally in China, you need to get a local license and have a local registration in order to pass the exam for these rights. A tourist will never rent a car. A year ago, I received a letter from a man named Valikhan: he said that he was reading my blog, and in his notes about Japan he saw me mention my dream - to drive a car through the wilds of China. It turns out that Valikhan also had such a dream, with the only difference that he has been living in Beijing for ten years, has a license and a car, and of course, speaks fluent Chinese.

7 Should I say that I caught fire? We began to communicate, come up with a route, and a month later he was already meeting me at the Beijing airport. Everything was ready for the trip, and straight from the airport parking lot we went to Inner Mongolia, it's a ten hour journey.

8 There were many stories about China later, you can read them to buy my book "". Now I will continue the story about the road.

9 If the roads are ALREADY good, the drivers are YET not so good. The Chinese travel very little, very little themselves over long distances, for this there are high-speed trains and planes, they are also well developed. The main transport on highways is trucks. And truckers are a specific people.

10 They have their own ideas about the rules of the road and a kind of driver's ethics. For example, it is indecent to overtake a colleague and move back to the right lane, so you need to drive in the left lane at the same speed and wait for the other driver to slow down himself, as if politely giving way. Cars in the back? God, what nonsense!

11 The road builders also have a peculiar sense of humor.

12 The most interesting China is where there is no asphalt and freeways. There are fewer and fewer places like this.

13 This is the exception rather than the rule.

14 When they pave the way, they do it well and with a reserve for the future. High-quality asphalt and lights, even in remote areas. The right philosophy is better to do now than not to do later.

15 Sometimes this approach looks comical. In Russia, I saw exactly the opposite picture, there was a road, bam - and no.

16 Each province of the country has its own rules traffic. There can be a lot of differences, starting from the speed limit. And each lane can have its own speed.

17 It happens that everything is the same, cars 120 with a minimum of 60, buses and trucks - no more than 90.

18 It happens that the left lane is used only for overtaking, it is impossible to drive on it. But often the opposite is true, for example, only cars keep to the left lane, only trucks get to the right. Or even more sophisticated, in the left everyone goes, but faster, in the right, too, everything, but more slowly. And if you are driving on an empty road in the right lane 120, you can be stopped by the police: violated!

19 Of course, the road infrastructure and its design are different.

20 Traffic lights, intersections, even signs can be different.

21 In America, too, there are differences between the states, but not so big.

22 Is it difficult to travel in China without understanding the characters? A considerable part of the indexes is generally duplicated in English.

23 At the same time, an English translation is also found.

24 You will still be driving on navigators, so you won’t get lost.

25 In addition to the usual road signs, there is “social propaganda” on the roadsides, which urges people not to drive when they are tired.

26 Or explain that arguing with your wife while driving can cause an accident.

27 But traveling in China without Chinese is almost impossible, you won’t even be able to communicate with the hotel staff, let alone find the right hotel: to accommodate foreigners, you need a separate license, many do not have it. Google and Booking in the outback are not helpers, you need to use local software. At the same time, if there are those who are interested, we are thinking with Valikhan to make a tour for a small group next year. In a China that no one else will show.

28 Do you like Chinese roads? Good ones, right? There is one nuance - almost all high-speed highways are paid. Moreover, they are seriously paid, the cost of travel on them is slightly less than the cost of gasoline that you spend on the road.

29 Payment points are beautiful, and do not look alike.

30 Regional peculiarities decide. In Mongolia, these will be yurts, in Tibet, stupas, and in the city of Chengdu, where the largest panda nursery in the country - you yourself understand.

31 Police. There are few on the roads. Law enforcement officers appear only if something happened.

32 But their mobile posts are near every toll booth on the highways.

33 And here's where it's important not to get caught. Cars are stopped selectively, just like that, to check documents. If Valikhan had complete order with them, then I didn’t! There were international laws, in which, although it is written that they operate in China, in China itself they do not know about it. One day we got pulled over while I was driving, and that's what it was.

34 In other villages you will find old empty roadblocks and checkpoints, but they no longer work.

35 China has changed a lot in the last decade, just along with the roads. And it will continue to change.

36 In general, the police here do not give a nightmare to drivers, and are more involved in education than punishment.

37 Why spoil your own karma and add work? Punitive functions on the roads are performed by impartial cameras.

38 There are many of them. Lots of. Hidden and explicit, measuring speed, checking registration, monitoring lanes.

39 But the camera has a big advantage: it doesn't care that you're a foreigner.

40 Cameras are installed even in remote villages in the foothills of Tibet. And there is no getting away from it.

41 Gas stations. When you're on a long journey, it's not just a place to stop to pour gas and drain yourself. This is the whole world. One could write a separate story about filling complexes in China, but I won’t.

42 Incidentally, Shell is the only international brand on the country's roads, and this was the only gas station I met.

43 Chinese gas stations are strange. It's either empty...

44 Or thick. In the worst case, you will even be poured gasoline from a tank, at best, they will feed you, put you to bed and still dance.

45 This is also a gas station, for example.

46 And now, my favorite. Lounge areas at Chinese gas stations. Ready to take a look inside?

47 Don't be scared! We didn’t see toilets like that often, we just started our journey with a poor and unkempt Inner Mongolia.

48 Usually latrines are such grandiose buildings that it is indecent to call them even toilets. Urination Palace!

49 So that no one stood in line, the Chinese slapped a hundred booths at each gas station. A company of soldiers can write at the same time!

50 There was a mistake with the washbasins, in the morning there was a line of people who wanted to brush their teeth.

51 I could say a lot more about the roads in China, but this post is already too long. So you ask what you want to know and I will answer.

Many would like to travel back to ancient times, because it seems that life was much easier then. Clean air, fewer people, and most importantly - no traffic jams! You will be surprised, but the first traffic jams appeared in antiquity. Where did it all start and where is the biggest traffic jam in the world?

History of traffic jams

The great and powerful Roman Empire actively developed its political and trade relations, and roads would be very useful for this. Back in the 5th century, the Romans had special norms and procedures for building roads. In those times, it was the Roman Empire that had the most dense network of roads, which were divided depending on the means of transportation along them. So, there were separate roads for horses and chariots.

Under Emperor Caesar, the rules of the road first appeared, but, despite the excellent transport organization, the first traffic jams also appeared in Ancient Rome. After the collapse of the Empire, movement in its territories was no longer so stormy.

In the 17th century, with the growth of cities and a clear increase in the number of people, the phenomenon of traffic jams occurred again. Carriages, moving along the small European streets, often could not pass quietly. There were too many of them, which made it difficult to move around.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the construction of metros briefly helped to solve the problem of traffic congestion by taking over part of the passenger traffic. However, traffic jams soon returned and are still an unpleasant part of many city dwellers.

World records. The biggest traffic jam in the world

People living in big cities, inevitably encountered traffic congestion. They represent a congestion of vehicles on a separate section of the road. At the same time, cars move much slower than expected, or do not move at all. The severity of traffic jams is measured by kilometers of car chains, or by the time spent in traffic jams.

The first largest traffic jam in the world was recorded in the USA, in the state of Washington. Then, in 1969, a huge number of people hurried to the Woodstock festival, forming a traffic jam 32 kilometers long.

For Brazilians, a traffic jam in Washington would seem like flowers. In 2008, the Brazilian city of Sao Paolo experienced the longest traffic jam in history. The length of the traffic jam was 292 kilometers.

The country that undoubtedly breaks all records in terms of the number of transport and where the largest traffic jam in the world is located is China. This traffic jam should rather be called the longest, as the drivers spent about ten days in it. In 2010, the Beijing-Tibet highway seemed to freeze. There were many reasons for this: accidents, traffic overload, repair work on the road. Entrepreneurial merchants even organized mobile food shops.

Traffic jams

The congestion of roads by trucks and vehicles is growing in China, the largest traffic jam in the world formed in China is irrefutable proof of this. Many countries have already begun to address these issues. For example, in Italy, the center of Rome is forbidden to visit by car to anyone except those living in the area.

Residents of Beijing cannot use a private car every day. For each driver, there is a separate day in the week when he can use the car, depending on the last digit of the number. On Monday, for example, only those whose numbers end in 1 and 5, etc., can ride.

Conclusion

Perhaps using a car is very convenient and much more pleasant than crowding with strangers on the subway. However, the fact that traffic jams create even more inconvenience and take much more time cannot be denied. And the biggest traffic jam in the world, which occurred in Brazil, and the longest in China, only confirm that the time has come for a person to change something.

Each of us at least once in life happened to get into a traffic jam. If this happens to you again, do not be nervous, remember that it can always be worse. For example, you may be stuck in a traffic jam on a highway in China. The Celestial Empire celebrated National Day from October 1 to 7. On this occasion, more than half of the inhabitants of the world's largest country in terms of population went on vacation. As a result, a giant traffic jam was formed on one of the highways in the Hong Kong area, about 3 kilometers long. After what you have seen, traffic jams in your hometown will not seem so big to you.

8 PHOTOS and 1 VIDEO

1. Drivers of cars that were driving along the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau highway got into a traffic jam for many hours on October 6. (Photo: East News).
2. A traffic jam formed in front of and after the new toll booth on this road. (Photo: East News).
3. The thing is that behind the paid terminals, and there were 25 of them, the highway narrowed sharply. What can be seen in the photographs. (Photo: East News).
4. The Chinese Ministry of Transportation has estimated that... about 750 million people left for relatives and friends or for vacation, many of them by car. (Photo: East News).
5. This year, China broke the world record for the number of cars on the country's roads. (Photo: East News).
6. You will not envy the Chinese. However, they've had traffic jams worse than this one. (Photo: East News).
7. So, on August 14, 2010, a traffic jam more than 100 kilometers long formed on the main G110 highway and the Beijing-Tibet expressway, in which drivers had to stand for up to 10 days. Many cars were moving at a maximum speed of 1 kilometer ... per day. (Photo: East News).
8. Giant traffic jam in China. (Photo: East News).

This is what a traffic jam looks like in China.