I left Tateshina at 4:00 pm and arrived in Tokyo at about 11:00 pm. A 2.5 hour drive turned into a fucking nightmare. I have never been in a traffic jam this bad. Does anyone know what happened? I saw 1 car stopped in a tunnel, that was it. Also just as I was coming into Tokyo I saw at least 15 police vehicles with lights flashing going in the opposite direction. It seems the Chuo expressway was a little busy last night. Anybody got any answers?
15 comments
Normal holiday traffic.
Holiday traffic and about two accidents
Yeah always check the traffic trends before driving on long weekends and holidays and choose a route that avoids the worst traffic jams if you can. Accidents will also be much more frequent because shitty drivers who only get behind the wheel a few times a year will suddenly be booking it down the highway with their families (or college students – most of the accidents I see on the expressway involve car loads of college students), or looking at their smartphones in traffic so they rear end someone.
I just googled it and there was a news article published a week ago predicting 30km long traffic jams on the chuo expressway for this weekend due to silver week.
When I’m coming back on the Chuo on a holiday weekend, I try to make sure I leave wherever I am at 2pm, 3pm at the latest. Even then you can get caught but if it saves an extra three hours it’s worth it.
Long weekend holidays and people going places. Also the highways going to and from Tokyo are tiny two lane type. They are always congested, sometimes more than normal. If an accident happens, it’s a chain reaction and traffic congestion will occur. It takes hours to get the traffic going again to a reasonable speed.
It’s always like that. Our family came to visit us in Nagano for Ocean day. 3 hours to arrive. nearly 8 hours to return. Lots of time to be jealous of the motorcycle riders that just wiz right by.
Driving in Japan is a nightmare sometimes.
Half of the Meishin from Kyoto to Hyogo is closed for repairs at night which is probably contributing to the jams up the line towards Tokyo as everyone is being rerouted to one singular route. This doesn’t help with the holiday traffic.
Two accidents and that stupid tunnel with incline where everybody goes slower making a perpetual traffic jam. It was beyond any normal holiday traffic. Took three hours from Kofu to Hachioji. Crazy.
The pass from Kofu to Tokyo backs up every Sunday night. I drove it weekly on Sunday night and an hour drive would regularly take 3-4h. It was so bad sometimes that leading 3h later I got to my apartment in Tokyo at about the same time I would have leaving earlier.
Holidays are worse.
The biggest back up is about mm45 there is a 3-2 lane compression into a tunnel. Even without an accident once you get past that bottleneck things normally speed up.
Never drive on National holiday. Or if you must do it the day before work. Japanese tend to not do things the day before work starts again when national holidays are involved. So if monday is off, they wont do things on the monday, they will all do it all the Saturday and Sunday(partly due to discount on tolls).
If you have no choice, start you drive home before 12:00pm.
I drive around a lot. As long as you follow those rules you will avoid the worst and situations like that
Average Sunday Chuo expressway experience.
I’m sorry this happened to you. What I do is take off a day before and a day after the holiday. I either travel after midnight or from 5 am. This is usually an alright way to beat the traffic. Also, if possible, I go north. It seems, anecdotally from my own experience, to be better traffic wise to choose destinations north of Tokyo. Assuming you were on a road trip. If you were just coming home on your regular route then this doesn’t mean anything haha
Saturday, out bound from Tokyo F-ed (Firday nights getting F-ed), Sunday in bound to Tokyo F-ed. Hoildays add another hour or two.