Another monster traffic jam hits China
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In yet another gargantuan traffic jam, 10,000 trucks were backed up in a line stretching upto 120 km on the Beijing-Tibet roadway in northern China. Trucks loaded with coal from Inner Mongolia were struck bumper-to-bumper on the highway with traffic police frantically trying to control chaos as they reminded the drivers to stay wake on the treacherous mountainous highway, the official China Daily reported on Saturday. The trucks were backed up for miles on the northern China highway on Friday, the latest in a series of monster jams that have plagued the overloaded road since maintenance work began on a parallel route earlier this summer, the report said. The highway has been experiencing massive snarl since mid-August as authorities have begun work on the Beijing-Xinjiang highway. Report said last month trucks were struck on the highway for upto five days with drivers of the immobilised vehicle playing cards and sleeping in the open to pass the time. The number of trucks stuck turned the highway into a virtual parking lot, the official China Central Television reported. As the new gridlock surfaced, about a week after the two-week long pile up which hogged the headlines all over the world, officials said energy hungry China has to live with the pain until new rail networks were built to carry the coal and other raw materials to feed hundreds of factories around the capital. The pile up has become a such serious issue that the reticent state media has now began focussing on it, highlighting the travails faced by thousands of drivers and passengers of the cars and buses caught up in the pile up which at one time went on for 20 days. The pile up has become an embarrassment of sorts for Chinese official establishment which takes pride in creating the immaculate infrastructure all round the country, which was instrumental in attracting large scale investments from abroad. Initially the traffic jam was attributed to just maintenance work in the Beijing-Tibet highway. Officials of the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau said four highways - Beijing-Tibet highway, National Highway 110, Xiguan road and Beijing-Xinjiang highway - all converging into the last one creates huge transportation pressure and causes congestion. In the first half of 2010, the output of raw coal in Inner Mongolia reached about 338 million tons, up 18.7 per cent over the same period last year. The jams have already affected the incomes of truck drivers who have been trapped on the highway, according to reports on CCTV. In about half a month, the expressway has experienced at least three traffic jams.
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