Chinese National Highway 110 experienced a traffic jam in 2010 that lasted for 12 agonizing days and stretched for 62 miles, moving at a blistering pace of two miles per day.

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Chinese National Highway 110 experienced a traffic jam in 2010 that lasted for 12 agonizing days and stretched for 62 miles, moving at a blistering pace of two miles per day. Local vendors gouged drivers by selling water and instant noodles at ten times the normal price, essentially creating a hostage economy on the asphalt. Drivers passed the time by playing cards, sleeping under their trucks, and presumably reconsidering every life choice that led them to buy a car in the first place. This apocalyptic gridlock was ironically caused by heavy trucks carrying coal to Beijing to help meet the booming energy demand. It stands as a beautiful testament to modern infrastructure, proving that humanity can engineer a road so efficiently that it traps thousands of people in a rolling purgatory just so a city can keep its lights on

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Chinese National Highway 110 experienced a traffic jam in 2010 that lasted for 12 agonizing days and stretched for 62 miles, moving at a blistering pace of two miles per day.

A closer look

A bigger world.One discoveryat a time.

Keep exploring

The country where people direct traffic by hand

Los Angeles engineers spent over four hundred million dollars to fully synchronize every single one of the four thousand five hundred traffic signals across the city in a desperate bid to alleviate infamous gridlock.

Modern suspension bridges are deliberately engineered to physically flex, bend, and violently sway in heavy crosswinds or rolling earthquakes to prevent the massive rigid steel…

Shrinking massive train turntables for tiny yards

Late nineteenth-century bicyclists actually launched the original campaign to pave American roads, spearheading the Good Roads Movement decades before automobiles even became a common sight on the streets.

The NYC subway is one of the only major transit networks to run fully 24/7. What invisible crisis does this cause?

A bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.