高速“停车场” (gaosu tingchechang): Highway 'parking lot'

There were serious traffic jams on the highways in many cities especially at the beginning and end of the seven-day National Day holiday. On some highways vehicles hardly moved for hours, and some netizens joked that the holiday had turned highway into a huge parking lot.

The weeklong National Day holiday is a good chance for people who work and study in other cities to go back home for family reunions and for people to enjoy trips to tourist attractions, thus the traffic pressure is always heavy during the holiday. The situation gets noted especially since 2012, when in a bid to promote tourism and boost the domestic economy, the State Council announced there would be no tolls to pay to use the highways nationwide during the four national holidays.

So as not to pay any highway tolls, many people wait until midnight before the public holidays begin to enter the highways, and spend many hours moving slowly along the highways with others who have done the same. In some highways people even get out of their cars to walk their dogs during hours-long traffic jam. How to reform the public holidays is always a hot topic.