Painful Growth: 9-day long traffic jam in China continues on

From the “And you thought YOU had it bad?” department comes a report from the AFP, via Google News.  The report says that drivers on the Beijing-Tibet expressway experienced a slowdown on August 14th due to extra cargo trucks entering the roadway headed for the capital, and the problem was compounded 5 days later by scheduled roadway maintenance.  Now there’s a mini-economy of merchants selling food and water at inflated prices to stranded motorists – who says greed isn’t good?  The traffic jam, which crawls continuously, is expected to last until the end of the road maintenance, which is scheduled to continue until mid-September.

Chalk this up the rate of growth of the Chinese automobile industry – it’s seen an increase of 1 million cars in the last 2.5 years, almost ten times faster than cities like Tokyo did it.

by John Suit

Source: AFP via Google News