In Beijing, leave was cancelled for all 7,000 of the capital's traffic police, who were positioned on the roads to maintain traffic order and ensure students got to their exams on time.
Immediately after the bombings, the army and the police tightened security across the capital, bringing traffic to a halt in many areas.
As the officials arrived on Friday, tens of thousands of workers marched through the streets of the Italian capital, snarling traffic and demanding action to ameliorate the crisis.
Along the rutted 600-mile highway linking Yushu to the provincial capital, Xining, traffic was light on Thursday, with most vehicles bearing provisions, concrete electric poles and, in the case of one slow-moving truck, coal.
Cairo is a safe and exciting city and there's certainly no risk involved other than frustration at the time you spend stuck some of the Egyptian capital's traffic jams and not having longer to explore further.
And with three million cars registered in the capital, car traffic growing at 2% a year and arterial routes frequently gridlocked, it seems like a move in the right direction for London.
Tucked away in a noisy corner of south London is a haven of tranquility where the constant hum of the capital's traffic is drowned out by the buzzing of bees.
Today, cyclists draw a special kind of vitriol from drivers in America's car capital, where traffic congestion is increasingly intolerable as the region's population grows by an estimated 50,000 people a year.
Seeking to hobble the protests, the authorities cancelled buses the Brotherhood had hired to ferry their people to the capital, stopped traffic miles from the rally, and broadcast that the police would let "counter-demonstrators", official lingo for beltajiya (government thugs), stage a rival protest.
Thanks to the Nairobi Tented Camp, which opened in 2011, visitors can now sleep in the park – and tucked into a tree-lined valley, it's hard to imagine that the capital's traffic jams lie only a few miles away.
