This is a genuine photograph of a traffic jam in China. However, the caption frequently attached to this image is a bit misleading.
This photograph was taken in October 2015 at the end of Golden Week, a week-long national holiday in China, and it captures heavy congestion at a toll gate on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway
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While this highway may expand to about 50 lanes at this toll booth — we counted the number of approximate car widths on a higher resolution version of this image and found that the “50-lane wide” expression was generally accurate for this portion of the road — the G4 expressway is not a “50-lane highway.”
That answers some questions then opens up new ones. How does 50 toll booths make sense for a 4 lane highway? Contactless tolls existed back then and of all the countries, surely China of all places would be able to implement it cheaper and easily get drivers to install the contactless device needed as well as set up the license plate surveillance to enforce it.
How does 50 toll booths make sense for a 4 lane highway?
Because passing through a toll booth slows down each vehicle, you can move more vehicles through the space with additional terminals. Unfortunately, when you’ve got peak traffic, the folks on the other side of the terminal can still create congestion as they merge back into the smaller lane.
The solution to this, from the Chinese perspective, is massive investment in High Speed Rail.
Even contactless tolls require drivers to slow down and pass through a gated entrance. You’re not going through a terminal at 100 kmph. Wide toll gates like this exist from Houston to Hamburg.
You have to deal with the inevitable folks who don’t have the right kind of RFID tag, don’t know how to properly navigate the gate, or simply fuck up as drivers passing into a congested part of the freeway.
I mean that’s clearly just a toll plaza, right? Not actually a 50-lane highway, that then drops down to 4. Also that’s not 50, looks closer to 25-30 toll lanes.
In the U.S. we put a sticker on the windshield that gets scanned when the car passes through. While you are supposed to slow down a bit they work just fine at 100km/hour. They could leave the road at 4 lanes and get rid of all of the booths. Minimal traffic back up.
We purchase the stickers at your local grocery store.
It’s a bit hard to tell accurately from this picture but I counted the lanes of cars near the bottom somewhere in the 48-50 range though there are only 25 or so actually toll booths so who knows.
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