Shanghai Street View: Road Reliance
It’s rare for traffic accidents to make major headlines here in Shanghai, especially when there are no major casualties, graphic images or allegations of big criminal behavior. But that’s exactly what has happened over the last few days, as a roll-over accident involving a large truck loaded with heavy cement pilings consumed the city’s attention for much of the past week.
No one was killed in the accident or even seriously injured, and the truck driver wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or wanted for any other crime. Images of the wreck weren’t very exciting either, leaving TV and newspaper editors with the unexciting choice between pictures of broken guard rails and cranes removing the cement pilings from the truck and road.
But any commuters from the city’s northwestern areas will know that what made this particular crash such big news was where it occurred, namely on the Middle Ring Road. What’s more, the size of the truck and weight of its cargo caused significant damage to the elevated highway, prompting a shutdown of a major stretch on one of Shanghai’s busiest traffic arteries.
The accident has caused a sort of traffic Armageddon for people living in the area, who now face the choice of long waits on congested surface streets or similarly long lines for one of their few travel alternatives on nearby subway lines. More broadly, the accident also spotlights how rapidly Shanghai’s streets have transformed over the last 2 decades, as thousands of kilometers of new road and highway construction have made travel much easier but also vulnerable to major disruptions.
The accident that continues to ripple through the headlines occurred just after midnight as the new work week was beginning in the wee hours of Monday morning, and saw a significantly overloaded truck crash into a guard rail on the Middle Ring Road above the intersection of Hutai and Wenshui roads. The cement pilings loaded onto the truck weighed 100 tons, even though loads weighing more than 55 tons aren’t supposed to use the elevated expressways.
The truck’s huge weight and impact of the crash caused a section of the elevated highway to buckle, forcing officials to close a section of the Middle Ring Road for up to 2 weeks until critical repairs could be completed. While it’s easy to blame the truck’s driver for the mess, it does seem like this kind of accident was inevitable due to the frequent and often illegal use of our many new expressways and roads by huge overloaded and often slow-moving and smoke-belching trucks.
Expanded Traffic Clean-Up
As Shanghai moves into the third month of its separate campaign to clean up the city’s unruly traffic, perhaps it should consider adding drivers of these outdated, overloaded and often highly polluting vehicles to its list of key targets. Such vehicles can lead not only to this kind of major accident, but are also a more general menace due to their large size and slower speeds, as well as their drivers who often use their big weight to bully other vehicles on the road.
This latest accident is reminiscent of a similar pair of highway bridge collapses that occurred during a major earthquake when I lived in Los Angeles in 1994, creating traffic nightmares for commuters for a couple of months. But at least we in Los Angeles could blame Mother Nature. By comparison, Shanghai residents can only point the finger now at a truck driver who almost certainly knew he was breaking the law and putting the public and city roads at risk with his illegal behavior.
The accident underscored how Shanghai has become a city of commuters over the last 2 decades, and also how dependent it is on its expressways to significantly lower travel times. Far fewer people commuted in the China I lived in back in the 1980s, since most people’s homes were very near their state-owned work units.
One of my older Shanghai friends once told me that a trip from the popular bar district around West Huaihai Road to my home in Hongkou District back then might have taken up to an hour on an average day. Today such a trip now is easily possible now in 15 or 20 minutes using the Yan’an Elevated Road and Bund Tunnel.
At the end of the day, Shanghai and China should be quite proud of this national network of state-of-the-art roads and highways built in such a short time, even if many of us grumble about the nuisance and expense of so many tolls. But this week’s accident also spotlights how dependent many of us have rapidly become on such roads, and how China’s unique blend of old and new vehicles and many people’s disregard for traffic laws can put the entire system at risk.
