3 ms·
I recently visited Beijing for a few weeks and was worried about AQI (I have a kid with situational asthma) . Most of the time AQI was around 50, and sometimes
by r00fus 2y ago
I recently visited Beijing for a few weeks and was worried about AQI (I have a kid with situational asthma) . Most of the time AQI was around 50, and sometimes it got to 100. Not bad at all for us.
Just a point of reference: back in 2009 we transited through Beijing to fly to HK and even just spending a few hours in the airport resulted in my daughter having to use an emergency nebulizer.
This time hardly anyone had a problem. Beijing used to be dry and dusty (from what my wife tells me from visiting 30y ago) now they've pulled in a lot of water through some newer canals and the humidity is really high (mosquitos are starting to become a problem).
Another improvement is: nearly zero 2-stroke motors. All scooters and mopeds are fully electric. Also 50% of the cars are electric (green license plates). All city buses and taxis are electric. Road noise is greatly reduce given the sheer volume of traffic (though they love to honk - like India).
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoBeijing is pretty humid in the summer, I’m not sure where you get dry from (although my first summer in Beijing wasn’t until 2002, not quite thirty years ago). Dust storm season is spring and pollution season is winter (especially when they get inversions). Fall is the best season to tour in Beijing if you want clean air and no dust, the air won’t start getting bad until November, although moving all the farmers away from coal heating has improved things a lot (they still have bad inversions, but like LA and Salt Lake City). Two strokes have been banned for awhile, electric bikes were already taking over in 2002, you already could no longer find the tuktuks that I remember from my first trip in 1999.