A little while ago a visiting VIP remarked that traveling around Beijing had been surprisingly quick and easy, despite all the warnings he'd heard.
"By chance, were you in an official Olympic car?" my wife asked innocently.... As it happens, he was!
Jianguo Lu, looking west toward 3rd Ring Road intersection, 2pm August 9. (Lo-rez camera phone shot.) Left-hand lane: Olympic Lane. Other lanes: everyone else.
Of course it's true that traffic controls have removed a lot of normal congestion, and sometimes the Ring Roads look positively wide-and-open. But sometimes the congestion has just been displaced.
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James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best-seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.