Traffic in China

Beijing motorists desperate to use their cars are resorting to sham marriages to get around strict license plate rules. The rules are designed to limit the number of vehicles allowed on the city’s congested roads. Some drivers were willing to pay the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars to marry someone with one of the prized plates, according to CCTV. They then have the license transferred to their name before getting a divorce. Specialist agencies charge over $20,000 to help clients use this method to obtain a license for a gasoline-driven car. It costs over $15,000 for an electric-powered one, according to the report. The scam is a strategy to get around a license lottery first int

An overpass collapsed onto busy traffic in Wuxi city in east China’s Jiangsu province on October 10. Reports say that three vehicles were trapped and three people died.

The 29-year-old Liu Fucao lives on the south bank of the Yangtze River in the sprawling southwestern Chinese city of Chongqing. But his office lies on the north bank, and takes about an hour to get to thanks to the city’s congested roads. So this former competitive paddleboarder has come up with a shortcut that slashes his commute from an hour… to six minutes. Check out our video, above, for more.

A series of attacks on bus drivers across China has come to light after a bus plunged from a bridge and plunged into the Yangtze river last month, killing 15 people on board. At first, the internet and media blamed a woman driver caught up in the crash. But subsequent video released has revealed that the crash came about because of a passenger who was fighting with the driver. It’s hardly the first time altercations on Chinese buses have caused trouble. Watch our video to find out more.

Before it turned tragic, the fight was petty. A passenger had missed her stop, and began arguing with the bus driver. The vehicle was traveling over a bridge in Chongqing, a sprawling municipality in southwest China known for its bustling industry and spicy hotpot. The fight was first verbal, Chinese investigators said, and then physical. The passenger hit the driver in his head with the phone in her hand. The driver hit back, taking his right hand off the steering wheel to swipe at the woman. Spooked by the altercation, other passengers began screaming at the duo to cut it out. Before long, amid a chorus of desperate cries, the bus swerved toward the side of the bridge, struck a car and th

China has the world’s largest rail network. It’s fast, cheap and efficient. But that doesn’t mean it’s always a great experience. China’s internet has recently been dominated by debate over a number of high-profile “seat robbers:” people who refuse to sit in their assigned seats on crowded trains. Last month, a man was caught on camera sitting in the wrong seat on a Beijing-bound high-speed train. When an attendant told him to give the seat back to its owner, he refused. And this week, another video went viral which showed a passenger who insisted on sitting in a window seat, instead of the aisle seat she had booked. “This seat is mine!” the woman was heard shouting at a security officer.

China wants in on the Hyperloop. Coined and popularized in 2013 by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, Hyperloop describes a transportation system consisting of a tube and capsules within that are capable of moving people and cargo at high speeds. The concept has since been adopted by Musk’s own tunnel boring company, and outsiders as well. On Thursday, Los Angeles-based company Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT), unaffiliated with Musk, said it had struck a deal in China to help build what it claims to be first such system in the country. The partnership could be a boon to China, which has identified railway equipment as one of the 10 advanced technological sectors it seeks to do

More than 500 workers in Zhangjiajie, central China’s Hunan province, took just three and a half hours to combine three separate railway lines. Working late at night, they combined the existing tracks to a new 210-mile high-speed rail line. When complete in 2019, the high-speed rail line will link the cities of Chongqing, Zhangjiajie and Changsha, cutting travel time along the route from 10 hours to just three. Infrastructure for high-speed trains, which are designed to travel at speeds of at least 155mph, have spread rapidly across China in the past decade. The network is set to cover 24,000 miles of track by 2025.

Any self-respecting fugitive will tell you that before you speed away and go into hiding from the cops, you start paying your road tolls in cash. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tech powers the electronic toll payment services in the United States that allow drivers to install transponders and pay for the use of roads and bridges without having to stop at a toll plaza. But it could also be used to track your vehicle – as might be the case in China. In a step that will bolster its already expansive surveillance program, the Chinese government will mandate the installation of a radio-frequency identification chip on all new vehicles, the South China Morning Post confirmed on Thursday. T

Few things get on people’s nerves more than unnecessary car honking. But in Beijing, it’s about to be a thing of the past. The Beijing Traffic Management Bureau has installed 20 honking recognition systems near hospitals and schools throughout the city. Every time a car honks, the acoustic camera will locate the source. The “acoustic camera” system consists of a 32-microphone array, a high-definition camera, a display screen, a flash and a processing system. Once a car honks, the microphones zero in on the source of the sound. The camera will then capture the image of the car’s license plate and film a two-second video. It happens almost instantaneously. Police officers can then use the dat