bad traffic

Just a few pics I took when we got stuck in the worst traffic I've ever seen last weekend. Nothing moved for about an hour and a half. Everyone turned off their cars and just hung out in the street. All the city buses emptied out and we walked down the middle of the street around the cars-avoiding the mass of people, cars, buses and motorcycles trying to use the sidewalk-the rest of the way home.

The Golden Rule on the road in China is..."Me First". Usually that is the cause of jams like this. Looks like a good one.

Looks like it wouldn't be much fun to be in a hurry to go anywhere - especially anywhere needing an ambulance. 

That intersection is a regular quagmire. It has been made even worse since they put up the barrier down the center of the street. Now the cars cannot use the oncoming traffic lanes while waiting to turn left. . Often it is faster to just walk down the road and catch a taxi that kicked out its passengers and pulls a u-turn to get out of it. Unfortunately it can take a long time to reach the end of the jam (or begining)

Those fences down the middle of the road are questionable safety devices.  The main road out of town runs between two of the school campuses here and fences just like those were recently put up.  Crossing the street is harder and also a lot less safe given the rise in not just people driving motorcycles and bikes on the wrong side of the road, but also coming down the wrong side and all converging on the one gate that lets you on to the right side.  Someone should write their congressman.

Which city? Beijing?

this is from good ole Wuhan

yah the fences are a terrible idea. They might make sense if people obeyed traffic laws to begin with, but with everyone used to doing whatever they want, the barriers only make things worse. After one intersection gets jammed and cars cannot get across, a lane on each side of the traffic light becomes empty (ie going north one way and going south the other). Cars backed up going the opposite direction then find any openings further up or down and cross over and start going the wrong way to pass the stopped traffic. This happened while we were walking. Then the intersection jam broke up and the cars started flying up the road, only to be met by the cars headed the wrong way. With the barriers there they had no way of getting back. Quite the entertaining/dangerous situation.

Wuhan traffic sucks at rush hour, and the fact that subway construction above ground takes up all but one lane in some places doesn't help. Nor does the fact that the tunneling machine was prioritized to build the Hangzhou subway, and so the Wuhan Bucket Brigade won't finish the lines here until 2012. But seriously after driving by and seeing some of the subway construction sites, it wouldn't surprise me if they are digging by hand.