Zinghe County, China, Aug. 25: Can a monster traffic jam spanning dozens of miles and leaving drivers stuck for days really disappear overnight?
For days, Chinese and foreign media have issued reports explaining how thousands of vehicles were trapped in an epic traffic jam stretching for more than 100 kilometres (60 miles) on a highway leading to China's capital Beijing.
The bottleneck on the Beijing-Tibet expressway, which began on August 14 due to a spike in traffic by cargo-bearing heavy trucks and was compounded by road maintenance works... seems to have vanished.
A team of AFP reporters drove 260 kilometres on Wednesday along the highway out of Beijing, through the northern province of Hebei and into Inner Mongolia -- and did not encounter anything but intermittent traffic jams at toll booths.
Hundreds of trucks were on the road to Beijing, packed with everything from produce to live goats -- but the traffic was moving.
“The situation has gotten much better recently. I don't know why,” a female gas station attendant in Huailai county, roughly halfway from the capital to Xinghe county in Inner Mongolia, told AFP.
Officials at the Beijing traffic management bureau were not immediately available for comment.
The state-run Global Times said Monday the jam had spawned a mini-economy, with local merchants capitalising on the stranded drivers' predicament by selling them water and food at inflated prices.
The stretch of highway has become increasingly prone to massive tailbacks as the capital of more than 20 million people sucks in huge shipments of goods.
Traffic slowed to a snail's pace in June and July for nearly a month, according to earlier press reports.
China has embarked in recent years on a huge expansion of its national road system but traffic periodically overwhelms the grid.
According to government data, Beijing is on track to have five million cars on its roads by year's end. The four million mark was passed in December.
The head of the Beijing Transportation Research Centre, Guo Jifu, warned this week that traffic in the capital could slow to under 15 kilometres an hour on average if further measures were not taken to limit the number of cars.
But the news agency AP reported a different picture while quoting Chinese officials.
The news agency quoted authorities to say that triggered by road construction, the snarl-up began 11 days ago and was 60 miles (100 kilometers) 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 less than a mile (just over a kilometer) on the worst section, said Zhang Minghai, a traffic director in Zhangjiakou, a city about 90 miles (150 kilometers) northwest of Beijing, according to AP.
AP said China Central Television reported on 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, according to 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 US 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, California, 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 US 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 US 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.”