say do you remember niihaomaa in china 03: traffic jams

when im stuck in traffic jams, i always wonder who, where, when, how, and why the mess shows up so suddenly. sometimes the cause is rather obvious, like accidents, but most of the times its less visible.

in china, traffic jams are a part of life. people cannot live without them. in fact i was stuck in traffic jams couple of times and was even almost miss a flight. a chinese friend of mine told me the reason was because of the increasing number of car owners in the case of wuhan. another said its simply because of the number of cars and people.

when i was observing roads in china, i also found another reason, the different speed of adaptability to chinese changing built and technical environment. although individual economic level has been improving so rapidly and consequently the number of cars has been increasing, the infrastructure to control traffic (i.e. traffic management) is not catching up with them.

furthermore, the number of people are not catching up with chinese rapid speed of development. i came across to number of people who were trying to cross roads making the flow of traffic suffocated. there were plenty of people walking on roads rather than sidewalks. there were some motorbikes ran counter to the traffic flow.

i believe that the traffic management technique will be soon improved. in fact, the metro network in shanghai and beijing was reliable and wuhan is implementing metro system. yet it would be real hard for some to adapt the speed of development. the trend of urbanization cannot be reversed and more and more people are coming to cities from rural areas for better job opportunities and they might not know urban lifestyle. further, the number of car ownership will continue to increase in a next few decades i guess. from these perspectives, probably the life with lighter traffic jams will not be realised so soon.