China's '50-lane highway' traffic jam is the final boss of getting stuck driving home

If you thought your commute was bad, wait until you get a look at China’s ’50-lane highway’ traffic jam.

This image has been doing the rounds for a while now.

It exemplifies the worst kind of traffic you could imagine.

But all is not quite as it seems.

Around the world, there are some seriously gnarly traffic jams

Nobody likes getting caught up in a traffic jam.

It’s time consuming, it’s boring, and it’s just down right furstrating.

But some traffic jams are worse than others, and we’ve seen plenty of them come up over the years.

In China, one traffic jam was so bad that it was declared ‘the world’s worst’.

Given that it lasted for 12 days, we’d say that this was an apt label.

There’s another image you’ve no doubt seen on your social media feed at one point or another.

The truth about the ’50-lane highway’ traffic jam that you’ve undoubtedly seen online

The visual spectacle of a ’50-lane highway’ being held up like this is enough to make your jaw drop and your heart skip a beat.

It’s every driver’s worst nightmare.

But as is often the case with viral images, false details have been attached to the image.

A particular cause of contention is around the claim that this is a ’50-lane highway’.

That’s not quite what’s going on here.

This image was taken in October 2015, at the end of Golden Week – a week-long national holiday in China.

The stretch of road in question is a toll gate on the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway.

It might be a bit of a technicality, but the portion shown in the picture isn’t the highway.

No, this is the toll plaza, where dozens of booths are lined up to process the inflow.

So technically, this wasn’t a 50-lane highway.

The G4 Expressway is a standard four line highway, only expanding to fit 50 cars when at the Zhuozhou Toll Gate.

And even then, it doesn’t have 50-lanes; there are only 25 official lanes, Snopes reported.