Fifty lane highway becomes carpark as Beijing residents return home after long weekend

If you think holiday traffic is bad in your city spare a thought for the residents of Beijing where even 50-lane highways become carparks when locals return to the smog after a long weekend away.

Such a scenario played out yesterday on the just passed National Day holiday with some reports saying up to half of China's 1.3 billion population hit the road around the same time.

Incredible footage shot from a chopper in Beijing shows up to 50 lanes of the G4 Beijing-Hong Kong-Macau Expressway at a standstill as motorists queue up at the toll booths.

But the bigger bottleneck was a new checkpoint installed just after the toll booths that reduced the 50-lane freeway to around 20 lanes.

Highways in other major cities including Shanghai and Nanjing also witnessed epic traffic jams but none were reportedly as bad as the one experienced in the capital.

Between October 1 and 7 more than 750 million Chinese were on the move, China's National Tourism Administration estimates.