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The reason it "works" in rural China is people largely don't drive places, at least not the way Americans do. Lots of tech folks love to shit on "car-culture"
by hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
The reason it "works" in rural China is people largely don't drive places, at least not the way Americans do.
Lots of tech folks love to shit on "car-culture" in the US, and while I agree it has resulted in really crappy urban design for a lot of US cities, you can't ignore that a lot of people love their cars because it gives them a ton of freedom. People like being able to go off at a moment's notice, independently, and drive long distances.
America may be an "outlier", but that still doesn't mean that it's reasonable to think we'll move from where we are now to getting rid of our cars because that's how China does it.
- seanmcdirmid 2y agoTaxis give you most of that for inner city travel. I don’t mean American taxis, I mean Chinese taxis that are everywhere. If that was a fleet of self driving cars, then it really would be like wait one minute for a taxi if you aren’t going somewhere on peak. My point, though, isn’t how China can show America how to do things, just that American car culture is unusual and unlikely to apply to most of the rest of the world. There are also costs of dumb decisions to consider, which is going to affect the competitiveness of our cities long term (Shanghai doesn’t have to make the same stupid decisions that Denver did, and eventually it just isn’t worth doing business in cities with crappy transit infra), and eventually some more optimal norm is going to affect even the USA.