THE WORLD’S worst traffic jam is the sort of record you don’t really want to shout about. Though it’s a measure of economic success or perhaps of the point at which success runs up against its physical limitation. China in the last two weeks has twice broken world records with traffic jams over 100 kilometres long: the first took a full 10 days to clear with many drivers sleeping in their cars for up to five days; the second, in the north eastern region of Inner Mongolia is still in place. (São Paulo holds the dubious distinction of having the greatest length of roads tied up simultaneously – in June 2009 the record was set with more than 293 kilometres of accumulated queues.)
China’s gridlock is a product of two phenomena – its soaring demand for cars and the seasonal surge in demand for coal. In August, the Chinese snapped up more than 1.2 million new vehicles and 248,000 were registered in Beijing alone in the first four months of the year. Freight traffic on China’s motorways has grown a third faster than gross domestic product since 2003 – a 13.3 per cent annual rate. By the end of this year it is projected that 75 million vehicles will be jostling for road space that is simply not there.
Crucially, Mongolian coal production has also exploded – up 37 per cent to 637 million tons last year alone, with 15 per cent more expected this year. Electricity usage has surged in China as economic growth recovered to 11.9 per cent in the first three months of 2010. That has spurred the demand for coal, which accounts for 69 per cent of the primary energy needs of the country. Much of it is shipped by road at this time of year along the G110 expressway that runs from inner Mongolia to Beijing and other major seaboard cities. The road is designed to carry a maximum of 6,000 trucks a day. According to a report from Deutsche Bank, it currently has to cope with 80,000.
China is desperately trying to catch up with the demand for road space and has been on a building binge – in 2000 it boasted about 12,000 kilometres of motorways. A decade later, it has 65,000 kilometres, not much less than the US road system which it plans to overtake by 2020. Rail construction has moved almost as quickly.
However, China can take some consolation from the state of its roads. India overtook it in 2006 as top of the world league for road fatalities: up 40 per cent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008. In China road deaths have fallen for most of the decade to 73,500.