Inside China’s Massive Holiday Traffic Jam

Golden Week turns a freeway into a parking zone

A drone pans across the Wuzhuang Toll Station in Anhui and all you see is pink—hundreds of taillights unfold across 36 lanes that compress into 4. Holiday drivers are pouring out of China’s National Day/Mid-Autumn “Golden Week” and into a pressured merge that defeats momentum. Local experiences pegged effectively over 120,000 autos passing the plaza on the ultimate day. Nationwide, Golden Week tallied ~888 million home journeys and about ¥809 billion (~$114B) in spending, a surge strong enough to overwhelm even the nation’s largest toll station. The photos really feel unreal; the geometry explains every little thing.

Why Wuzhuang Clogged

Plazas are fast only when stream stays balanced. Wuzhuang followers visitors into dozens of lanes so automobiles can clear scanners rapidly, then forces them to zipper back together virtually immediately. Open every sales space and it still slows: the 36-into-4 squeeze creates chronic turbulence at peak quantity. That’s precisely what you get when thousands and thousands return home on the same day.

The scale, in context

Video Source: news.com.au

This isn’t the longest jam China has seen; that title belongs to the 2010 Beijing–Tibet hall mess that stretched roughly 100 km over 12 days. Wuzhuang is different: shorter but wider—a single plaza swallowing a small metropolis’s price of automobiles in hours. It also sits inside the world’s largest high-speed highway community: by the end of 2023, China counted ~184,000 km of expressways, more than any other nation. Big roads clear up most days. Surge days expose the choke factors.

What it Means for Drivers (and Carmakers)

• Thermal and consolation assessments: Hours of stop-and-go punish cooling systems, cabins, and batteries. Vehicles with sensible idle methods, environment friendly HVAC, and well-tuned shift maps win days like this.

• Driver-assist that issues: Adaptive cruise, lane-centering, and traffic-jam help ease fatigue when average speeds crash into the one digits.

• Planning beats horsepower: Apps, staggered departures, and freight time-windows scale back the crush more than additional cubicles ever will.

Quick Comparison for US Readers

• Plaza scale: Wuzhuang’s 36 lanes dwarf typical US toll plazas, which normally feed more evenly into through lanes.

• Network size: The US Interstate spans ~49,000 miles; China’s expressways complete ~114,000 miles and keep increasing. Most days, visitors flies. On national return day, physics calls the pictures.

Bottom Line

Call it a masterclass in bottlenecks. The viral China visitors jam at Wuzhuang wasn’t a glitch in technology or a thriller in human conduct. It was a simple formulation—too many automobiles + one brutal merge—performed out on a supersized stage after one of the busiest journey weeks on earth. It just goes to show you the answer to congestion is sort of never more lanes; people just fill them.

This story was initially reported by Autoblog on Oct 10, 2025, where it first appeared in the News part. Add Autoblog as a Preferred Source by clicking right here.