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If something’s crammed, communist, and a country it’s probably China.
China used to look like this but now it looks like this.
The country’s grown enormously in the past few decades both in population and wealth.
Now, of course global warming isn’t real and the earth is flat, but in a world where
global warming was real and the earth was some other shape, the best thing you could
do to combat turning Minneapolis into Miami would be to be poor.
The poorest half of the world’s population only contributes 10% of all carbon emissions.
This does make sense as the richest .01% of the world eat their imported truffled wagyu
filets on their private jets traveling to Ibiza for the day while the poorest .01% eat
their meals by, well, not but the bigger factor is what happens as people get into the upper
10 or 20 or 30% of world wealth.
China, for example, was poor but now it’s somewhat rich which means that its population
now eats things like hamburgers which, no joke, are slowly killing the environment as
cows fart huge amounts of methane which is a greenhouse gas.
More importantly, though, more and more people in China own cars.
There are now 217 million cars on Chinese roads which, considering there were only 59
million ten years ago, is a lot.
That means that in ten years, China has essentially had to triple the capacity of its roads which
is basically impossible.
Hence, traffic.
Now, this is one of China’s busiest roads—National Highway 110.
This highway connects inner Mongolia, the part of Mongolia that’s in China, to Beijing,
the capital.
G110 didn’t, however, used to be so busy.
What happens when your country transforms from being mostly composed of poor rural farmers
to relatively rich urban populations is that suddenly you need energy to power everything.
See, here’s a graph that says a thing!
China didn’t really go for that hippy wind or solar energy, they went for coal.
70% of their overall energy need is fulfilled by this rock.
Of course this isn’t sustainable long term as coal isn’t a renewable resource like
wind or Batman reboots but for now, it’s a cheap and easy source of energy.
That’s helped by the fact that China has about 13% of the world’s coal in its ground
while Mongolia, China’s neighbor, has about 10%.
A good amount of China’s coal is in inner Mongolia, the region, and they also import
plenty of coal from Mongolia, the country.
What China doesn’t have, though, is coal transportation infrastructure… or YouTube,
a free press, a market economy, freedom of movement, freedom of speech, a freely floated
currency, or time zones, but the transportation infrastructure is the important thing it’s
missing in this case.
There are, for example, only seven roads that cross the border from Mongolia, the country,
to China, the country.
What’s worse, there are barely any railways and trains are the primary means of transportation
worldwide for coal as it’s really not very dense and trucks can’t carry that much.
This lack of railways means that there are huge amounts of trucks driving from inner
Mongolia to Beijing carrying coal each and every day.
There are a few routes these trucks can take into Beijing but the most popular one is G110.
That’s because much of the coal coming from inner Mongolia comes from illegal, unlicensed
mines and, while the other routes from inner Mongolia have inspection stations to combat
illegal mining, G110 does not.
All these factors compounded to create the beginnings of a traffic jam on August 14th,
2010.
It was the busy summer season and the highway just couldn’t handle the amount of trucks
but the real problem started five days later as maintenance work began on the highway to
fix damage from overuse.
That shut down half the lanes at points and this traffic jam, which had already been going
on continuously for five days to a lesser extent, just became a parking lot.
At its worst, the congestion lasted for 60 continuous miles and drivers were only able
to move as little as 0.6 miles per day.
It took some close to a week to make their way through this stretch of highway—a journey
that would normally take an hour.
This whole mini-economy sprung up as villagers from near the highway walked or biked up and
down selling food and drinks.
Water, which normally sells for 1 yuan, went for 15.
Drivers took naps under their trucks, played cards, took walks, there really was no reason
to be behind the wheel as nothing was moving.
Throughout this all, authorities desperately tried to reduce the traffic by sending trucks
on different routes and telling people not to drive.
As the jam entered its second week nothing seemed to be working although, with time,
as it gained national and international media attention, people eventually stopped taking
the highway and then, finally, after twelve whole days of bumper to bumper traffic, the
congestion dissipated and National Highway 110 was back to normal.
China has since built railways, expanded highways, and cracked down on illegal mining which has
prevented any more apocalyptic jams but this August 2010 one on G110 is now believed to
have been the worst traffic jam in world history.
If you want to learn how to make apocalyptic jam unfortunately Brilliant does not have
a course on that but they actually do have a course on how to make regular jams, traffic
jams.
Their physics of the everyday course includes a whole section teaching how traffic jams
form and work.
Brilliant, as you know by now, is the best place to be taught complex concepts as they
teach the intuitive principles so you understand rather than just learn.
If you want to become the sort of person who can explain the physics of traffic jams, Brilliant
is the place for you as they have courses on that and plenty of other interesting topics
such as artificial neural networks, number theory, and solar energy.
Best of all, you can try Brilliant classes for free by signing up at brilliant.org/HAI
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