On Tuesday, October 7, 2025, China’s largest toll station, Wuzhuang in Anhui province, became the focal point of a traffic event so massive that it captivated the world’s attention and turned social media into a gallery of glowing red taillights. As millions of holidaymakers attempted to return home at the end of China’s National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival “Golden Week,” an astonishing gridlock unfolded, leaving thousands of vehicles lined up across the station’s 36 lanes, only to be squeezed into a mere four-lane queue beyond the toll gates.
The spectacle was nothing short of surreal. Drone and aerial footage, widely shared across platforms like X and Weibo, revealed endless streams of cars, their brake lights painting the night in a sea of red. Some observers even joked online that the scene looked so perfectly organized it could have been created by artificial intelligence. According to local reports cited by The Economic Times and news.com.au, well over 120,000 vehicles passed through the Wuzhuang Toll Station on that single day, all vying for a place on the road home after one of the busiest travel weeks on earth.
China’s National Day, celebrated on October 1, marks the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Traditionally, it kicks off a week-long “Golden Week” holiday, but this year, the festivities coincided with the Mid-Autumn Festival, extending the break from October 1 to October 8. The result? A record-breaking surge in domestic travel. According to China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism, approximately 888 million trips were made during the holiday period, a significant increase from the 765 million trips tallied during the previous year’s seven-day holiday. The economic impact was equally staggering, with spending during Golden Week estimated at around 809 billion yuan, or roughly $114 billion, as reported by news.com.au.
The design of the Wuzhuang Toll Station, Asia’s largest, is both its strength and its Achilles’ heel. The station fans traffic out into 36 lanes, allowing cars to clear scanners quickly. But almost immediately, those 36 lanes are forced to merge back into just four, creating a textbook bottleneck. On most days, China’s vast expressway network—now totaling about 184,000 kilometers, the longest in the world—keeps vehicles moving at a brisk pace. But on national return days, even this super-sized infrastructure bows to the laws of physics and human behavior.
“Plazas are fast only when flow remains balanced,” explained news.com.au. “The 36-into-4 squeeze creates chronic turbulence at peak volume. That’s exactly what you get when millions return home on the same day.” The result was a masterclass in traffic bottlenecks: a jam that was shorter than China’s infamous 2010 traffic nightmare, but far wider in scale.
The viral images and videos sparked a flood of reactions online. Social media users marveled at the geometry of the jam, with some likening the glowing lanes to a scene from a video game. One X user quipped, “I would rather die than be in that jam.” Another commented, “Pretty organised traffic jam,” while a third observed, “These guys, they even made being stuck in traffic look attractive.” Others questioned the continued reliance on toll booths in an era of electronic tolling, with one person writing, “I thought China was at the peak of technology. Toll booths are 20th-century. Electronic tolling reduces congestion.”
Authorities, recognizing the severity of the situation, issued urgent appeals to residents, encouraging them to take alternative routes to ease the pressure on the highways. In the southern city of Shenzhen, officials extended the operating hours of subway and bus services in a bid to reduce the load on the roads, as reported by The US Sun and NDTV. Despite these efforts, the queues at Wuzhuang stretched as far as the eye could see, with some drivers stuck for hours in the slow-moving crush.
The jam at Wuzhuang inevitably drew comparisons to China’s most notorious traffic event: the 2010 Beijing–Tibet Expressway gridlock. That episode, which lasted for a record 12 days and stretched over 100 kilometers, was caused by a combination of construction work, increased heavy truck traffic, and a series of breakdowns. Some drivers moved as little as one kilometer per day, and villagers along the route reportedly capitalized on the situation by selling instant noodles, cigarettes, and other essentials at inflated prices. As NDTV and The Economic Times recounted, the 2010 jam remains a cautionary tale of what happens when infrastructure is pushed beyond its limits.
Yet, the Wuzhuang event was unique in its own right. While the 2010 jam was defined by its length and duration, this year’s gridlock was remarkable for its sheer width and the number of vehicles involved. The plaza became a symbol of modern China’s mobility paradox: a nation with the world’s largest high-speed road network, yet still vulnerable to the brute force of synchronized holiday travel.
For drivers, the experience was a test of patience and technology. As news.com.au noted, hours of stop-and-go traffic punished both vehicles and their occupants. Cars with advanced cooling systems, efficient HVAC, and smart idle strategies fared better in the heat and chaos. Features like adaptive cruise control, lane-centering, and traffic-jam assist offered some relief, but no amount of horsepower could outpace the bottleneck. “Planning beats horsepower,” the report emphasized, suggesting that staggered departures, better apps, and smarter freight schedules could do more to alleviate future jams than simply building more lanes.
China’s rapid development of its motorway network is nothing short of astonishing. As The US Sun pointed out, the country had no motorways at all as recently as 1988. Now, with more than 100,000 miles of highways and a series of engineering marvels—like the multi-level Huangjuewan Interchange in Chongqing, which went viral earlier this year for its dizzying design—the nation stands as a testament to the power and perils of modern mobility.
But as the Wuzhuang jam demonstrated, even the most impressive infrastructure can be humbled by the collective force of human movement. The takeaway? Sometimes, the solution to congestion isn’t more lanes, but smarter planning and a little more patience when everyone’s in a hurry to get home.
