You think you have it bad

When I was a kid and I did not finish my vegetables, my parents would always remind me of the poor children starving in other parts of the world. Well now, parents who have children who complain about how long it takes to drive somewhere can say, "You are lucky you are not a child stranded in the 60+ mile traffic jam in China."
It appears China's new love affair with the auto combined with truck traffic has resulted in a 10-day traffic jam that may span into September. The WSJ reports that businesses popped up along the route to take advantage of the captive audience, and law enforcement was out in force to quell the unrest.
We in the United States have never experienced such a thing, and I hope we never will, but we certainly have felt the negative impact of our own love affair with the car, and it has resulted in new thinking around the way we develop and move around. For example, we have embraced mixed use developments that support alternative forms of transportation. The Chinese have their own ideas, and you can read about them here.

Online game lets you solve traffic gridlock

How many times have you sat in traffic and thought, "If they just synchronized the traffic lights, all this congestion would go away."
Well, a new game called "Gridlock Busters" from the University of Minnesota, Intelligent Transportation Systems Institute, allows players to do just that.

You can test your mettle in processing vehicular traffic through a network of intersections. As you begin at the bottom rungs of a city traffic department, you're encouraged and coached by a senior traffic group member to take on more challenging conditions as you climb the bureaucratic ladder.

If on your watch honking cars max out the so-called frustration meter, you lose your tenure in the city's traffic group, and it's back to the mailroom for you. Enjoy.