Beijing's '50-lane highway' turns into a sea of cars as traffic reaches unprecedented levels

Following China’s National Day Golden Week celebrations, Beijing’s ’50-lane highway’ turns into a sea of cars as traffic reaches unprecedented levels.

The week is famous for drawing hundreds of millions of people onto the roads, but this year, the traffic chaos reached fever pitch.

Aerial shots taken from the sky show an ocean of cars packed onto the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway as holidaymakers tried to return to the capital.

The traffic jam built up near a massive toll plaza outside Beijing, where dozens of lanes from toll booths merge back into the main highway, known as a ’50-lane highway’. These pictures will cause stress just looking at them.

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Beijing’s ’50-lane highway’ turned into a sea of cars

China’s National Day Golden Week celebrations always cause a bit of traffic chaos when people travel to see friends and family to celebrate, but this year, it created an ocean of cars.

The G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway is often jokingly referred to as a ’50-lane highway’, because from a bird’s eye view, it looks like a highway so large that it could easily be 50 lanes wide.

However, what people are freaking out about is actually the toll plaza designed with dozens of booths to process the incredible traffic volume.

Once drivers pass through the tolls, the lanes funnel down into fewer highway lanes, creating the bottleneck that leads to soul-destroying traffic jams like this one.

The traffic has reached unprecedented levels

Although China has the largest expressway network in the world, these peak holiday traffic nightmares still occur, even with the most advanced infrastructure.

While awe and disbelief have been expressed by many across the internet, the sentiment is probably not reflected in those poor holiday-goers who found themselves stuck in the bottleneck to end all bottlenecks.

We assume everyone eventually made it back into Beijing, but these pictures are quite stressful even to just look at, let alone experience.

Maybe it’s called ‘Golden Week’, because of the glow of a million headlights?