Beijing, Sep 6 (IANS) The monster traffic jam on the Beijing-Tibet highway, which was eased Sunday after a number of emergency measures taken by the authorities in China, is likely to recur in the near future, experts have said.
Apart from an 8-km section between the Inner Mongolia autonomous region and Hebei province, traffic was back to normal on sections that had been jammed for the past month, the China Daily reported Monday.
However, experts said the jam was likely to recur in the near future as the root cause of the problem – huge transportation demand on limited road capacity – remained.
The ministry of public security Saturday ordered traffic control departments in Beijing, Hebei and Inner Mongolia to establish a coordination centre to tackle the jam.
The Beijing-Tibet highway, with a designed length of 3,700 km, will link Beijing to Lhasa in Southwest China’s Tibet autonomous region once it is completed.
At present, the Beijing-Xining section is open to traffic and the Xining-Lhasa section is still under planning and construction. Currently, it is the only highway to Beijing and Tianjin from the northwest.
The recent traffic jam occurred mainly in the Hebei and Inner Mongolia sections once maintenance work began on a parallel route earlier this summer.
Poor road design and overloaded trucks were to blame, Fu Zhenhua, director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau, said in a statement.
