How often have you been stuck on the road in a traffic jam? It can be a very frustrating situation as you fidget impatiently, waiting for the road ahead of you to clear up. This can be a fairly common experience especially if you are a city dweller and you probably factor this into your daily travel time.
However, there are certain traffic jams that will make a total mockery of your plans and push you to the edge of insanity. The gridlocks featured here definitely belong in that category and it’s hard not to feel sorry for the commuters who were trapped in these situations.
10 Beijing, China - August 2010
In August 2010, the Chinese government embarked on a series on construction works along various sections of the major Beijing-Tibetan expressway. There was one small issue though; they didn’t have an accurate estimate of just how much the roadwork would impede the free-flow of traffic. It did not take long for a gridlock to form. It eventually grew into a nightmarish traffic jam that stretched for about 74 miles. It is estimated that the line, which included as much as 10,000 trucks, lasted more than 10 days before it slowly began to clear.
9 Bethel, New York – August 1969
This particular story revolves around the love for music and began when over 250,000 music lovers from New York and beyond headed to a local area in the city for the Woodstock festival, a celebration of pop and rock music. Of course, the roads at the time were unable to handle the surge in traffic volume. The result was one of the longest traffic jams in American history that led to up to eight-hour delays for a trip that would normally take about an hour.
8 Chicago, Illinois – February 2011
It was in the middle of winter and road users were rushing home in the city of Chicago when a furious blizzard hit and promptly squashed any notion of a hot bath after the trip home. The blizzard dumped over 20 inches of snow on the highway and this led to a traffic standstill; with drivers stuck in their cars for as much as 12 hours while they watched the snow levels slowly creep upwards. Some people were forced to abandon their cars on the road in order to get out of the freezing cold.
7 Beijing, China – October 2015
The city of Beijing in China is one of the most populous cities in the world and it should come as no surprise that it features twice on this list. This time the gridlock formed on the Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway. A checkpoint was constructed across the highway and it compressed 50-lanes of traffic into 20. The fact that the expressway has 50 lanes should give you a pretty good idea of the traffic volume. Now, imagine all that squeezed into 20 lanes – that’s the perfect recipe for a disaster.
6 Lyon – Paris - February 1980
Holiday goers who were returning to Paris after a winter vacation found themselves in an insane bumper-to-bumper situation that stretched for an incredible 100 miles. The exact cause of the gridlock remains unclear but a probable reason could be the poor weather, coupled with the volume of people headed back to the city at about the same time. Inevitable vehicle breakdowns would have undoubtedly added to the chaos, leaving travelers stranded on the highways for several hours as they inched their way back to the City of Love.
5 Sao Paulo, Brazil – November 2013
This happened on November 14, a day before the holiday weekend celebrating the proclamation of the republic. At about 6 pm, the city of Sao Paulo recorded 309km of traffic lanes; that’s approximately 36% of all monitored roads in the city. It was enough to earn the city a place in the record books with one of the worst traffic jams ever recorded. 100-mile jams are not as rare as one would think, in the congested city especially on Friday evenings but this particular one stood out because of the unusual number of people who were in the city for the upcoming Republic Day celebrations.
4 Hamburg, Germany – 1993
In 2018, Hamburg was declared as the state with the worst traffic jams in the entire country. Bumper-to-bumper situations are quite commonplace and sometime ago, in 1993, the city recorded one of its absolute worst traffic jams. The grid-lock stretched for more than a hundred miles and commuters were stranded for hours as they made their way home during a rush-hour period that was unlike anything they had witnessed before.
3 Houston, Texas - September 2005
This one can be blamed solely on Rita, a category 5 hurricane that swept through parts of Houston in 2005. Weather warnings and an instruction to evacuate prompted a mad rush for safety that jammed up the highways. The traffic took over 24 hours to clear up and left many people stranded for hours as they nervously waited in their cars for the situation to ease up. The evacuation proved to be necessary. Hurricane Rita caused up to $18billion in damages and killed over 100 people.
2 Lagos, Nigeria - June 2018
Lagos is the most congested city in Africa and one of the most populous in the world. As many as 20 million people are crammed into an urban area that measures 783km². That’s a population density of over 18,000 people per square kilometer. The traffic situation in the above image took place sometime in 2018 however, they are by no means uncommon, especially around major bus parks. The traffic jams can stretch for miles on end and apart from the frustration, commuters also have to deal with robbers and other miscreants who are always on the prowl.
1 Moscow, Russia – December 2012
It was winter season and if you live in Moscow, it can be an exceptionally harsh weather condition. You definitely don’t want to be stuck outside on the highways. Yet that was what happened to thousands of motorists who were stranded on the roads during a fierce storm that dumped as much as 2 feet of snow in some places. The weather played a part but the main cause of the traffic jam was attributed to the sudden closure of parts of the M10 highway, between Moscow and St Petersburg, by local authorities.