China’s Growth Leads to Problems Down the Road

ZHANGJIAKOU, China — Chinese authorities proclaimed an end this week to an epic traffic jam that had brought some drivers here to a dead halt for up to five seemingly endless days. Which is heartening news, save two problems.

One is that the traffic jam has not ended. “That’s impossible,” an officer at the Zhangjiakou Highway Traffic Police Detachment said Friday. “All the lanes are filled up. If you get on the highway from Inner Mongolia to Hebei, you’ll be stuck for four or five days.”

The other is that it may not end until, oh, 2012.

The Great Chinese Gridlock of 2010 — up to 60 miles long, on a freeway linking Beijing and Inner Mongolia’s capital, Hohhot — has earned a welter of global publicity this month on tales of drivers marooned for days in immobile traffic lanes, and profiteering locals selling them freeze-dried noodles at usurious prices.

“I spent five days and five nights last week without moving,” a trucker who conceded only his last name, Li, said during a roadside chat outside this city on Thursday. “Apart from sleeping, you just eat. And you can only eat the instant noodles.” These cost about 45 cents, from a roadside hawker, plus $1.20, for the water needed to soften them.

The gridlock has been building for up to a year, the inevitable result of the difficulty of China’s construction crews in keeping up with China’s breakneck growth.

In this case, a government decision to satisfy surging demand for electric power by tapping Inner Mongolia’s coalfields has flooded local highways with thousands of coal trucks, overwhelming police officers’ best efforts to herd them.

The government is building two new rail lines on the trucks’ route, one for coal and the other for freight, as well as a second passenger-only line to relieve congestion. But those railroads will not open until at least 2012, and perhaps later.

And so huge traffic jams of the sort that plagued this road in August are all but guaranteed to continue. Indeed, logistics experts here say the miracle is that more such bottlenecks do not occur.

“China probably does a better job of executing on this kind of big infrastructure than almost any other country, anytime, anywhere,” said John Scales, in charge of transport issues for the World Bank’s Beijing office. But even in China, where niceties like environmental impact statements are dispensable, planning and executing huge construction projects takes years, not months.

The challenges facing Chinese builders are clear from the statistics, which by themselves are staggering.

This nation has been on a building binge for decades — and indeed, the highway from Beijing as it begins its way toward Mongolia would largely be familiar to any American interstate highway driver. In 2000, China boasted about 7,450 miles of such expressways. A decade later, it has 40,400 miles, not much smaller than the American system, which it plans to leapfrog by 2020.

Rail construction has moved almost as quickly: 2,500 miles of new track a year, the Communications Ministry says, along with upgrades on existing rail lines to improve trains’ speed and carrying capacity.

But the government’s construction plans have not dovetailed with its equally vast energy plans. Electricity output has more than doubled just since 2000, and coal-burning plants produce about two-thirds of that power, compared to one-half in the United States. Shanxi Province, in Central China, once was the main coal source for power plants, but recent production and worker-safety problems there led the government to tap bigger coal deposits in Inner Mongolia, in China’s far north.

Therein lies a problem. Mongolian coal production has exploded — up 37 percent to 637 million tons last year alone, with an additional 15 percent increase expected this year. Much of the coal is supposed to move to seaports on China’s east coast, to be shipped to big cities in the south. But pig-in-python style, even China’s brand-new freeway system cannot handle the volume.

On an ordinary freeway, the 300-mile drive from Hohhot to Beijing would consume several hours. Here, China’s coal haulers say, the same trip generally requires up to three days’ travel, including weight checks and unloading coal. Recent traffic jams have pushed travel time to a week or more.

But even continuing east to Beijing — a six-lane stretch that winds past popular Great Wall tourist sites — traffic jams can stall drivers for hours. On a recent evening, a passenger whiled away two hours on a deadened stretch 60 miles from Beijing, as thousands of coal trucks idled and vendors darted among the vehicles, selling apples and other treats.

“The more roads they build, the more congested it gets,” one trucker, 45-year-old Wang Haihe, volunteered. “And then they build some more roads.”