6 ms·

As Beijing Becomes a Supercity, the Rapid Growth Brings Pains

65 points by doppp 11y ago

melling 11y ago
“Speed replaces distance,” Beijing has the second biggest subway in the world after Shanghai, and it carries the most people daily with over 9m riders. They are starting several more lines this year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway#Future_lines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway#Future_lines I believe the first low-speed maglev will be running this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR The NYT article makes Beijing sound like hell but they seem to be doing a great job of building the world's leading cities for the next century. In NYC they're still trying to figure out how to get more buses into Manhattan from New Jersey. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8564079/plans-new-bus-terminal-confront-steep-cost-estimates http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8564...
- thrownaway2424 11y ago
  If a "leading city" is one with no schools, no parks, no services, and no culture, where you wait in line for an hour for the bus, I'll go ahead and choose a trailing city, thanks. NJ-NY commutes are naturally self-limiting. They reach some kind of equilibrium of pain and then people start moving away. The Chinese government moves people around by fiat, so they don't necessarily benefit from the same forces.
  - sho 11y ago
    > The Chinese government moves people around by fiat If you'd read the article, you'd know that rather than "moving people around", the CPC has in fact been trying to keep people out via a residency permit system. They've failed, as the lure of jobs and lifestyle draws people to the large cities. This article is actually about them reacting to the very real market forces and embracing the influx of people, rather than trying to stop it. I swear, many commenters on HN haven't updated their knowledge about china for 30 years. "Moves people around by fiat" indeed.
    - oska 11y ago
      China relocated 1.24 million people for the Three Gorges Dam. [1] Farmers are still routinely moved off their land to make way for urban construction and nearly always miss out on the profits from the rise in value of said land. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of_residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of...
    - megablast 11y ago
      I have no idea what the next commenters point is, people are often moved around for big projects. Or do you imagine that they just let people drown when building the hoover damn, or London subway?
      - adventured 11y ago
        Large numbers of people were not relocated to build the Hoover Damn. Maybe you're not familiar with that region, it was not a population center of any consequence. The US has vastly different laws and practices than China when it comes to forcing people to move. Relocating a million people in this day and age, would simply never happen. Even the correctly maligned practice of using eminent domain for corporate benefit is exceedingly rare (even though it gets a lot of press). In fact, the US has the exact opposite problem - the inability to expand cities like San Francisco because the people won't allow it.
  - melling 11y ago
    I haven't been to Beijing but I'm guessing they do have these things. If they have a subway bigger than NYC, with 9 million daily riders, then not everyone is waiting for a bus. The NYT finds the worst then writes a story about it.
    - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
      No, they are waiting in security lines to get into the station. My wife goes through it every day, I just won't even bother.
      - regehr 11y ago
        Sean, when I visited in 2012 I don't remember any security lines, is this new? I found the Beijing subway to be far nicer than the ones found in major American cities. No surprise since it's much newer.
        rahimnathwani 11y ago
        Security checks (x ray machines for all but the smallest bags) were already in operation in 2012. I don't knew if anyone looks at the images. I have never seen anyone be challenged due to the content of their bag.
        seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        They don't really check, they just make you line up. Mind you, this is the busier stations that have huge backups, and some of that is related to capacity issues. But these days security is becoming the bottleneck because they never designed the stations for it.
        rdl 11y ago
        Is there some actual security threat they're designing against, or is it imitating the west, or a way for a contractor to make money (an even more accurate imitation of the west). I know there were some issues with Muslim separatists, but they didn't seem to even rise to the level of US terrorism threat. We do airport theater but not bus/subway theater, even in NYC.
  - brador 11y ago
    Agreed. Modern big cities are just worker hives. Better to choose a place for quality of life and whatever makes you smile.
  - longcheng 11y ago
    Beijing is any thing but a city with "no schools, no parks, no services, and no culture"... It's a city with thousands years of history, capital of 5+ ancient Chinese dynasties, top 2 leading China universities, Hollywood of China, ... How ignorant could a person be to make a comment like above?
    - DasIch 11y ago
      That's only true for a part of Beijing and an even far smaller part of Jing-Jin-Ji. Both of these things can be true.
    - vorg 11y ago
      > capital of 5+ ancient Chinese dynasties I know ther's Qing, Ming, and Yuan (Dadu). Not sure about any others.
  - mmanfrin 11y ago
    > The Chinese government moves people around by fiat Man, that seems inefficient, fiats can hold like 3 people tops (bad pun, sorry)
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Those subways are useless to me. I live and work on the same line (10) yet here I am in a taxi right now to avoid the discomfort and inconvenience of taking the subway door to door. It is crowded, the security lines are long, and the stations are places as awkwardly as possible.
- sharetea 11y ago
  NYT article has a point. I would just like to point out that Beijing also has traffic jams unparalleled in the world Traffic jam backs up 10km outside Beijing (http://bitly.com/1FSIJPB http://bitly.com/1FSIJPB) As well as pollution that have increased risks of cancer and premature death in Beijing (http://bit.ly/1GMIL7H http://bit.ly/1GMIL7H) It sounds like you're from NY; I wouldn't discount NY so quickly, without having visited Beijing to see for yourself. I've been to Beijing; I would never live in that place.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    I live in Beijing. That traffic jam was outside and affected primarily truckers who didn't want to pay a toll to take e expressway. Ya, still messed up, but not as incredibly so. The pollution is bad, especially in the winter. We are in summer now and it is merely not good rather than really bad. Today it even rained so it's a bit fresh out. There are plenty of cities that are much worse: Cairo, Tehran, New Delhi, ... I feel bad for those who have to work outside (crossing guards have it bad), but life expectancies in Beijing are quite correlated with lifestyle and income, just like anywhere else. If their is a dent in life expectancies, we won't see it for another 20 or so years.
    - sharetea 11y ago
      That traffic jam was just an extreme example, of course. But in my recent 3 taxi rides in Beijing, it's always been at least an hour stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. It's just a very old city not suited for the amount of cars and people currently or in the future.
      - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        Oh I agree. Especially right now with all the waidi-ren summer vacation traffic. You basically have two New York cities dealing with the road network of maybe...Portland, there are capacity problems! I deal by going to work before 6 and coming home before 3, or coming in at 10 and going home at 8. It still beats taking the subway.
  - 11y ago
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Per Wikipedia, Shanghai Metro managed "only" 7.75m pax/day in 2014? Both Seoul (9.2m) and Tokyo (8.7m) exceed that, and that doesn't account for the extensive non-subway commuter train/AGT/monorail networks in both cities. I'm not trying to be dismissive here, as I'm fairly sure both Beijing and Shanghai will power ahead some point in the near future, but just pointing out that the challenge of moving around ~10m people/day within a city isn't quite as novel as the article makes it sound -- and both Tokyo and Seoul have, by and large, made it quite tolerable to boot.
  - latch 11y ago
    Tangentially, what's impressive about Shanghai's metro is how quickly it became the longest. It essentially went from nothing to the longest in 15 years. Compared to the 20 years it took the Big Dig, or my own home city which has been talking / debating / purchasing / cancelling / assessing / suing re mass-transit, it really is an impressive achievement.
- erikb 11y ago
  For me it doesn't sound like hell reading the article. It sounds like an ambitious project that has problems to solve, like any other ambitious project. Considering that they already work on the international top (with New York and maybe other unnamed cities) in terms of scale, they are doing quite a good job. That's how I understood the article at least.
ilaksh 11y ago
But many city jobs in offices, including in Beijing like anywhere else, could actually go full telecommute, I believe. So I think the majority of commuting doesn't make sense anymore. Retail and services are probably at least half but that would reduce it a lot. What I think makes sense is for all cities to decentralize and convert to a mini-city/village model. Sort of a more urban better planned modern take on the suburb. That way retail and services can be more decentralized while most office work is telecommute/co-working/local housing. Another idea is, maybe you can stack land/housing plots, so people could still have a house, but it would live in a vertical structure like a narrow parking lot with large balconies. This would dramatically reduce the size of the residential/village areas so commutes would be shorter. Maybe a bunch of mini-city/villages in a circle around a big one in the middle, for weekly meetings or something. Then change the culture so weekend days rotate for different people to reduce contention. I know these things are not easy to change though.
- Htsthbjig 11y ago
  "But many city jobs in offices, including in Beijing like anywhere else, could actually go full telecommute, I believe." You are thinking like a Western. China is different. There is no such a thing like individual good bandwidth Internet connections in China, for a reason: it has to be controlled. In China only companies could have good Internet connections, and even so it has to be controlled in so many ways that it makes them ineffective, inefficient for personal communication. Imagine every single moment of your working life is recorded and stored and could be used against you in the future out of context. Chinese workers tell you personally things that NEVER will tell you on record. There is also the issue of the high ambiguity of Chinese language, the same expression could mean totally different things. Chinese government employs millions of people spying and censoring communications between people. The thing the Chinese government fears the most is people communicating with other people freely, and that is what telecommute really is. I have only worked telecommuting for years now, using mainly video calls. Japan and Korea are great places to do it, but China is not, and probably won't for a long time.
hankcharles 11y ago
NYC's subway may be much older, but I find it much more effective. Something Beijing lacks are express lines. If you need to travel the length of Manhattan in the middle of a workday, you can easily jump on 2,3,A, or D and get there quite quick. It is not the same in Beijing. Traffic gets terrible and trains are no faster because there are no express lines. traveling to different parts of the city during the day is a major undertaking no matter who you are. Where Jing-Jin-Ji really excels (and the New York Area really struggles) is in regional train travel. The regional high speed rail connecting Beijing to Tianjin; Shanghai to Hangzhou, or Suzhou is affordable, frequent, and quick. Affordable: last time I was there a one way ride was about $6 Frequent: they run at least every hour, typically every 1/2 hour. Quick: Trips between Cities like Beijing and Tianjin or Shanghai and Suzhou are about 30-40 minutes, and more important use stations in downtown locations. I don't know if there are any economic impact studies done on this, but the effect to me seems pretty profound. Not long ago, It would be a full day trip to visit Beijing from Tianjin if you are fortunate enough to have a car, and almost impossible to do in a day otherwise. Now it is almost thoughtless to go between the two.
- potatolicious 11y ago
  > "Something Beijing lacks are express lines." Honestly, if I had to come up with just one innovation that has shaped NYC the most, it has to be the 4-track subway. It not only gets you around faster but makes the system enormously more resilient to outages and anomalies. The fact that the subways are 4-track has shaped Manhattan and the outer boroughs in amazing ways. All the more disappointing all the new construction will be traditional 2-track :(
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  How much do you actually take NY area commuter rail or Bos-NY-Wash corridor trains? It sounds comparable to what you describe.
  - rattray 11y ago
    I just did a quick search on Amtrak - NYC-BOS is at least $100, and takes around 4 hours. It's a similar story going to DC ($80-$250, 3-4h).
IsaacL 11y ago
"It would be spread over 82,000 square miles, about the size of Kansas, and hold a population larger than a third of the United States. And unlike metro areas that have grown up organically, Jing-Jin-Ji would be a very deliberate creation. Its centerpiece: a huge expansion of high-speed rail to bring the major cities within an hour’s commute of each other." China seems to have a loose definition of "city". This sounds more like a densely populated area, with multiple cities connected by high-speed rail. Chongqing is another example -- it's billed as one of the world's largest cities with 30M+ people, but it's really a province that China has officially designated as a city.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  Even now Beijing is huge with many mini cities within; most of it is not densely populated. Also, high speed rail in China is not a commuter option: the train stations are outside the city, so you already have to spend an hour or more to get to them. Tianjin and Beijing are connected by high speed rail, which means you'll spend more time commuting to and from the train stations than you spend on the train.
Animats 11y ago
China's government is desperately trying to disperse things more. They'll succeed in time, but not enough of the transportation infrastructure is in place yet. Within a decade, it will be. The Baltimore-Washington corridor in the US has over 50 million people. However, it has no single metropolitan government.
brianmcconnell 11y ago
One of the images that impressed me most in my life was flying down the east coast of China, equivalent distance from Cape Cod to Florida, and seeing nothing but a Venus-like hellscape of smog. Wasn't any better on the ground. It was as if they had combined the worst aspects of Las Vegas development with Charles Dickens era London. I am not at all eager to go back. I know there's lot's o' money sloshing around there, but I also don't care to spend my time in an airport smokers cage, which is basically what that place is.
- contingencies 11y ago
  I'm glad you qualified with east coast... and frankly, I agree. We live way out in the west, in what amounts to the foothills of the Himalayas, where it's pretty damn clean. I haven't been to the east coast in about ten years now, and can't imagine it has improved. The last trip I did was this one - http://pratyeka.org/ennin/ http://pratyeka.org/ennin/ - following a Tang Dynasty Japanese Buddhist monk's diary. We got to one point where he said (at precisely the same time of year, when the weather and atmosphere was considered good and clear by modern locals) that he could see such-and-such a mountain to the west. We couldn't see shit. Visibility was, distance-wise, 10% of historical visibility.

65 points by doppp 11y ago

“Speed replaces distance,” Beijing has the second biggest subway in the world after Shanghai, and it carries the most people daily with over 9m riders. They are starting several more lines this year: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway#Future_lines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beijing_Subway#Future_lines I believe the first low-speed maglev will be running this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BCR The NYT article makes Beijing sound like hell but they seem to be doing a great job of building the world's leading cities for the next century. In NYC they're still trying to figure out how to get more buses into Manhattan from New Jersey. http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8564079/plans-new-bus-terminal-confront-steep-cost-estimates http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8564...

thrownaway2424 11y ago
If a "leading city" is one with no schools, no parks, no services, and no culture, where you wait in line for an hour for the bus, I'll go ahead and choose a trailing city, thanks. NJ-NY commutes are naturally self-limiting. They reach some kind of equilibrium of pain and then people start moving away. The Chinese government moves people around by fiat, so they don't necessarily benefit from the same forces.
- sho 11y ago
  > The Chinese government moves people around by fiat If you'd read the article, you'd know that rather than "moving people around", the CPC has in fact been trying to keep people out via a residency permit system. They've failed, as the lure of jobs and lifestyle draws people to the large cities. This article is actually about them reacting to the very real market forces and embracing the influx of people, rather than trying to stop it. I swear, many commenters on HN haven't updated their knowledge about china for 30 years. "Moves people around by fiat" indeed.
  - oska 11y ago
    China relocated 1.24 million people for the Three Gorges Dam. [1] Farmers are still routinely moved off their land to make way for urban construction and nearly always miss out on the profits from the rise in value of said land. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of_residents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of...
  - megablast 11y ago
    I have no idea what the next commenters point is, people are often moved around for big projects. Or do you imagine that they just let people drown when building the hoover damn, or London subway?
    - adventured 11y ago
      Large numbers of people were not relocated to build the Hoover Damn. Maybe you're not familiar with that region, it was not a population center of any consequence. The US has vastly different laws and practices than China when it comes to forcing people to move. Relocating a million people in this day and age, would simply never happen. Even the correctly maligned practice of using eminent domain for corporate benefit is exceedingly rare (even though it gets a lot of press). In fact, the US has the exact opposite problem - the inability to expand cities like San Francisco because the people won't allow it.
- melling 11y ago
  I haven't been to Beijing but I'm guessing they do have these things. If they have a subway bigger than NYC, with 9 million daily riders, then not everyone is waiting for a bus. The NYT finds the worst then writes a story about it.
  - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
    No, they are waiting in security lines to get into the station. My wife goes through it every day, I just won't even bother.
    - regehr 11y ago
      Sean, when I visited in 2012 I don't remember any security lines, is this new? I found the Beijing subway to be far nicer than the ones found in major American cities. No surprise since it's much newer.
      - rahimnathwani 11y ago
        Security checks (x ray machines for all but the smallest bags) were already in operation in 2012. I don't knew if anyone looks at the images. I have never seen anyone be challenged due to the content of their bag.
        seanmcdirmid 11y ago
        They don't really check, they just make you line up. Mind you, this is the busier stations that have huge backups, and some of that is related to capacity issues. But these days security is becoming the bottleneck because they never designed the stations for it.
        rdl 11y ago
        Is there some actual security threat they're designing against, or is it imitating the west, or a way for a contractor to make money (an even more accurate imitation of the west). I know there were some issues with Muslim separatists, but they didn't seem to even rise to the level of US terrorism threat. We do airport theater but not bus/subway theater, even in NYC.
- brador 11y ago
  Agreed. Modern big cities are just worker hives. Better to choose a place for quality of life and whatever makes you smile.
- longcheng 11y ago
  Beijing is any thing but a city with "no schools, no parks, no services, and no culture"... It's a city with thousands years of history, capital of 5+ ancient Chinese dynasties, top 2 leading China universities, Hollywood of China, ... How ignorant could a person be to make a comment like above?
  - DasIch 11y ago
    That's only true for a part of Beijing and an even far smaller part of Jing-Jin-Ji. Both of these things can be true.
  - vorg 11y ago
    > capital of 5+ ancient Chinese dynasties I know ther's Qing, Ming, and Yuan (Dadu). Not sure about any others.
- mmanfrin 11y ago
  > The Chinese government moves people around by fiat Man, that seems inefficient, fiats can hold like 3 people tops (bad pun, sorry)
seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Those subways are useless to me. I live and work on the same line (10) yet here I am in a taxi right now to avoid the discomfort and inconvenience of taking the subway door to door. It is crowded, the security lines are long, and the stations are places as awkwardly as possible.
sharetea 11y ago
NYT article has a point. I would just like to point out that Beijing also has traffic jams unparalleled in the world Traffic jam backs up 10km outside Beijing (http://bitly.com/1FSIJPB http://bitly.com/1FSIJPB) As well as pollution that have increased risks of cancer and premature death in Beijing (http://bit.ly/1GMIL7H http://bit.ly/1GMIL7H) It sounds like you're from NY; I wouldn't discount NY so quickly, without having visited Beijing to see for yourself. I've been to Beijing; I would never live in that place.
- seanmcdirmid 11y ago
  I live in Beijing. That traffic jam was outside and affected primarily truckers who didn't want to pay a toll to take e expressway. Ya, still messed up, but not as incredibly so. The pollution is bad, especially in the winter. We are in summer now and it is merely not good rather than really bad. Today it even rained so it's a bit fresh out. There are plenty of cities that are much worse: Cairo, Tehran, New Delhi, ... I feel bad for those who have to work outside (crossing guards have it bad), but life expectancies in Beijing are quite correlated with lifestyle and income, just like anywhere else. If their is a dent in life expectancies, we won't see it for another 20 or so years.
  - sharetea 11y ago
    That traffic jam was just an extreme example, of course. But in my recent 3 taxi rides in Beijing, it's always been at least an hour stuck in bumper to bumper traffic. It's just a very old city not suited for the amount of cars and people currently or in the future.
    - seanmcdirmid 11y ago
      Oh I agree. Especially right now with all the waidi-ren summer vacation traffic. You basically have two New York cities dealing with the road network of maybe...Portland, there are capacity problems! I deal by going to work before 6 and coming home before 3, or coming in at 10 and going home at 8. It still beats taking the subway.
- 11y ago
jpatokal 11y ago
Per Wikipedia, Shanghai Metro managed "only" 7.75m pax/day in 2014? Both Seoul (9.2m) and Tokyo (8.7m) exceed that, and that doesn't account for the extensive non-subway commuter train/AGT/monorail networks in both cities. I'm not trying to be dismissive here, as I'm fairly sure both Beijing and Shanghai will power ahead some point in the near future, but just pointing out that the challenge of moving around ~10m people/day within a city isn't quite as novel as the article makes it sound -- and both Tokyo and Seoul have, by and large, made it quite tolerable to boot.
- latch 11y ago
  Tangentially, what's impressive about Shanghai's metro is how quickly it became the longest. It essentially went from nothing to the longest in 15 years. Compared to the 20 years it took the Big Dig, or my own home city which has been talking / debating / purchasing / cancelling / assessing / suing re mass-transit, it really is an impressive achievement.
erikb 11y ago
For me it doesn't sound like hell reading the article. It sounds like an ambitious project that has problems to solve, like any other ambitious project. Considering that they already work on the international top (with New York and maybe other unnamed cities) in terms of scale, they are doing quite a good job. That's how I understood the article at least.

ilaksh 11y ago

But many city jobs in offices, including in Beijing like anywhere else, could actually go full telecommute, I believe. So I think the majority of commuting doesn't make sense anymore. Retail and services are probably at least half but that would reduce it a lot. What I think makes sense is for all cities to decentralize and convert to a mini-city/village model. Sort of a more urban better planned modern take on the suburb. That way retail and services can be more decentralized while most office work is telecommute/co-working/local housing. Another idea is, maybe you can stack land/housing plots, so people could still have a house, but it would live in a vertical structure like a narrow parking lot with large balconies. This would dramatically reduce the size of the residential/village areas so commutes would be shorter. Maybe a bunch of mini-city/villages in a circle around a big one in the middle, for weekly meetings or something. Then change the culture so weekend days rotate for different people to reduce contention. I know these things are not easy to change though.

Htsthbjig 11y ago
"But many city jobs in offices, including in Beijing like anywhere else, could actually go full telecommute, I believe." You are thinking like a Western. China is different. There is no such a thing like individual good bandwidth Internet connections in China, for a reason: it has to be controlled. In China only companies could have good Internet connections, and even so it has to be controlled in so many ways that it makes them ineffective, inefficient for personal communication. Imagine every single moment of your working life is recorded and stored and could be used against you in the future out of context. Chinese workers tell you personally things that NEVER will tell you on record. There is also the issue of the high ambiguity of Chinese language, the same expression could mean totally different things. Chinese government employs millions of people spying and censoring communications between people. The thing the Chinese government fears the most is people communicating with other people freely, and that is what telecommute really is. I have only worked telecommuting for years now, using mainly video calls. Japan and Korea are great places to do it, but China is not, and probably won't for a long time.

hankcharles 11y ago

NYC's subway may be much older, but I find it much more effective. Something Beijing lacks are express lines. If you need to travel the length of Manhattan in the middle of a workday, you can easily jump on 2,3,A, or D and get there quite quick. It is not the same in Beijing. Traffic gets terrible and trains are no faster because there are no express lines. traveling to different parts of the city during the day is a major undertaking no matter who you are. Where Jing-Jin-Ji really excels (and the New York Area really struggles) is in regional train travel. The regional high speed rail connecting Beijing to Tianjin; Shanghai to Hangzhou, or Suzhou is affordable, frequent, and quick. Affordable: last time I was there a one way ride was about $6 Frequent: they run at least every hour, typically every 1/2 hour. Quick: Trips between Cities like Beijing and Tianjin or Shanghai and Suzhou are about 30-40 minutes, and more important use stations in downtown locations. I don't know if there are any economic impact studies done on this, but the effect to me seems pretty profound. Not long ago, It would be a full day trip to visit Beijing from Tianjin if you are fortunate enough to have a car, and almost impossible to do in a day otherwise. Now it is almost thoughtless to go between the two.

potatolicious 11y ago
> "Something Beijing lacks are express lines." Honestly, if I had to come up with just one innovation that has shaped NYC the most, it has to be the 4-track subway. It not only gets you around faster but makes the system enormously more resilient to outages and anomalies. The fact that the subways are 4-track has shaped Manhattan and the outer boroughs in amazing ways. All the more disappointing all the new construction will be traditional 2-track :(
juliangregorian 11y ago
How much do you actually take NY area commuter rail or Bos-NY-Wash corridor trains? It sounds comparable to what you describe.
- rattray 11y ago
  I just did a quick search on Amtrak - NYC-BOS is at least $100, and takes around 4 hours. It's a similar story going to DC ($80-$250, 3-4h).

IsaacL 11y ago

"It would be spread over 82,000 square miles, about the size of Kansas, and hold a population larger than a third of the United States. And unlike metro areas that have grown up organically, Jing-Jin-Ji would be a very deliberate creation. Its centerpiece: a huge expansion of high-speed rail to bring the major cities within an hour’s commute of each other." China seems to have a loose definition of "city". This sounds more like a densely populated area, with multiple cities connected by high-speed rail. Chongqing is another example -- it's billed as one of the world's largest cities with 30M+ people, but it's really a province that China has officially designated as a city.

seanmcdirmid 11y ago
Even now Beijing is huge with many mini cities within; most of it is not densely populated. Also, high speed rail in China is not a commuter option: the train stations are outside the city, so you already have to spend an hour or more to get to them. Tianjin and Beijing are connected by high speed rail, which means you'll spend more time commuting to and from the train stations than you spend on the train.

Animats 11y ago

China's government is desperately trying to disperse things more. They'll succeed in time, but not enough of the transportation infrastructure is in place yet. Within a decade, it will be. The Baltimore-Washington corridor in the US has over 50 million people. However, it has no single metropolitan government.

brianmcconnell 11y ago

One of the images that impressed me most in my life was flying down the east coast of China, equivalent distance from Cape Cod to Florida, and seeing nothing but a Venus-like hellscape of smog. Wasn't any better on the ground. It was as if they had combined the worst aspects of Las Vegas development with Charles Dickens era London. I am not at all eager to go back. I know there's lot's o' money sloshing around there, but I also don't care to spend my time in an airport smokers cage, which is basically what that place is.

contingencies 11y ago
I'm glad you qualified with east coast... and frankly, I agree. We live way out in the west, in what amounts to the foothills of the Himalayas, where it's pretty damn clean. I haven't been to the east coast in about ten years now, and can't imagine it has improved. The last trip I did was this one - http://pratyeka.org/ennin/ http://pratyeka.org/ennin/ - following a Tang Dynasty Japanese Buddhist monk's diary. We got to one point where he said (at precisely the same time of year, when the weather and atmosphere was considered good and clear by modern locals) that he could see such-and-such a mountain to the west. We couldn't see shit. Visibility was, distance-wise, 10% of historical visibility.