RECENTLY, an epic traffic jam on an expressway leading to Beijing has been drawing global attention.

Since August 14 thousands of drivers got stuck in a 100-kilometer-long jam, for up to nine days!

I wonder if fame-crazed local authorities are already asserting another first with Guinness World Records.

Anyway, just a little twist is needed to make the epic jam inspiring.

For instance, an AOL report in late August asked: what would happen if a similar jam occurred on a Los Angeles freeway, and marveled at the absence of reports of road rage on the part of drivers mired in the monstrous gridlock.

As a matter of fact, on September 4 a Xinhua reporting team was already portraying a "delightful" scene when the jam eased, leaving only 8 kilometers of stranded vehicles.

The report blamed the jam on trucks laden with coal heading to fuel-hungry Beijing, an accusation unreasonable, and ungrateful.

The predication by Zhang Fusheng, general manager at a power company in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, made more sense: there would be no relief in sight as long as Inner Mongolia continues to be a generous supplier of coal to the rest of China.

The Xinhua report was misleading when it cited the lack of road space, adding that roadway construction lags far behind the surge in traffic.

For one thing, Chinese officials are generally obsessed with building more roads.

In seeking a real solution, our policy makers should shun expensive advice from greedy Western consultants, and return to common sense.

For instance, the sense contained in a message left by a Rupert Wolfe Murray at a website while commenting on the jam:

"Welcome to the future. China can expect a lot more of these epic traffic jams as all the major car companies are pushing their products onto the world's biggest market, and the European experience has shown that however fast you build motorways you can never get back to that moment when there was more road than traffic."

He points out that "The real future of transport is high-speed rail and the bicycle."

In this new paradise for auto makers, 10 million motor vehicles are snapped up annually, and 200 million cars are predicted to be on the road by 2020.

For we Chinese, future transport can only be its past glory: bicycles, rather than high speed rail, for even when a small fraction of Chinese are transported at high speed to another destination, there would arise the problem of how to disperse the crowd.

The true solution is to go slow, as cautioned recently by a Shanghai Daily reader.

If you still have doubts, just compare Hangzhou to what it was like 10 years ago. As transport steadily improves, Hangzhou looks more and more like another Shanghai. New roads create new demand, which calls for still more roads.

Demand

The real solution is to curb the ultimate demand for traffic.

As far as this epic congestion is concerned, blame not the trucks delivering coal, food, and vegetables to Beijing, but on Beijing residents' dependence on outside coal, which is mainly used for power generation, and outside food, which is essential.

Recently a college classmate of mine from Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region made a tour of Shanghai, and at a dinner we shared, he remarked: All this splendor and pomp you manage to conjure up with resources from other regions.

I was immediately put in my place for I know he was pointing to a simple truth. The natural gas from the northwest, the coal from the north, for instance.

I was particularly ashamed to realize that a considerable portion of the resources are consumed for no higher purpose but to dazzle, to impress - for instance the floodlights atop highrises and landmarks at night.

At 11pm on Tuesday night, when most residents were asleep, I could still see the glorious Yangpu Bridge dazzling with lights.

Nearby several searchlights were directing their beams skyward, so powerful that they clearly lit up the bottoms of floating clouds.

The floodlight atop some highrises a block away from my home was so intense that there was no need for me turn on the light to find books in my own study.

In this globalized world of ours, regional "division of labor" has been, mistakenly, held up as superior to self-sufficiency.

For instance, in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing, as local cropland is being grabbed for property developments, farming space is vanishing fast.

Some vegetables on Shanghai markets have traveled 800 kilometers from Shouguang in Shandong Province.

In Shanghai soaring real estate prices make both the fields and ex-peasants unfit for the challenge of farming.

This mode is being quickly copied as state-of-the-art in other aspiring metropolises. In Chongqing, for instance, the municipal government is luring 10 million farmers with urban hukou. The tradeoff: they must first give up their land.

Carbon buzz

Recently Anping County in Hebei Province imposed a 22-hour power cut every three days on residents, which also involves power to traffic lights, as part of government efforts to reach targets for carbon reductions.

The overwhelming response to the practice is one of outrage, but I believe such enforced blackouts or brownouts and constantly malfunctioning traffic lights offer some hope of true solution.

Energy-saving endeavors fail because they have been so far tossed about as a fashion concept, and tolerated only when they are not interfering with our comforts, however unnecessary these comforts are.

Our response is totally inadequate given the severity of the issue, an issue threatening the survival of our next generation.

Low-carbon increasingly becomes a gesture, a marketing stunt, favored even by auto makers.

A BMW driver can use the metro for one day and declare himself low-carbon. A globe-trotter flies around the globe, and then goes green by paying some dollars to "erase" his carbon footprint.

Unless we truly repent of our excesses by initiating painful sacrifices, we are only flirting with our posterity's survival.