- Drivers in Beijing drive slowly when there's heavy rain

- The sheer number of cars

- Drivers in Beijing advance into traffic-light controlled intersections even when the path ahead of them is blocked, causing a junction to get blocked up, even when all lanes leading away from it

I'm not sure what the other causes were (I heard that road space had just been reduced by the addition of a bus lane on the third ring road). I'm not sure what made that day much much worse than others (and it wasn't just me - I had a friend report a similar speed coming from a different part of the city).

I really wish Beijing had yellow boxes, and strong enforcement of not-stopping-in-junctions, like in London: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/red-routes/rules-of-red-rou....

I wish even more that the problem of humans needing to drive were solved.

But I'm not sure "Self driving cars are much more valuable to China than the US" is true. Each has a similar number of cars overall. China might skew more towards urban. But the cost for a full-time driver in China is 15%-25% of what it would be in the US, so the amount of GDP replaced by self-driving cars would be higher in the US, no?

Moreover, the lack of parking won't be solved by self-driving cars alone. People who can afford their own car will need to be persuaded to use car-sharing services instead. Without this, people will still want their cars to be near where they sleep, meaning that unused cars will still be jamming up the city whilst unused.