
As Beijing Becomes a Supercity, the Rapid Growth Brings Pains - doppp
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/20/world/asia/in-china-a-supercity-rises-around-beijing.html
======
hankcharles
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.

~~~
nichtich
The express lines are a known problem and Beijing is starting to build them
(the first two will be line 17 and 19). The difference is in NYC the express
lines and the regular lines run side by side, while the future express lines
in Beijing will be individually build and won't necessarily run parallel to
any existing lines.

The reason of the difference I think is the method of building tunnels. The
NYC subway system is build long time ago, when cut and cover is acceptable.
The width of the tunnel thus can be very wide, especially considering cost.
Make the tunnel twice as wide may only cost less than 50% more (I'm guessing
the number). Modern tunnels are mostly built using TBM, in which case the cost
of making the tunnel twice wider may cost more than 100% because of the
affects of multiple TBM working side by side may be hard to predict and hard
to coordinate. So in this case it may be better to just build a regular line
first, and than build a express line in a different route.

I'm not a civil engineer, so my reasoning may be completely wrong.

~~~
JamesBarney
That's really interesting to know the reason effecting size of tunnels.

And for those who don't know TBM - tunnel boring machine

------
melling
“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/2015/03/8564...](http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-
hall/2015/03/8564079/plans-new-bus-terminal-confront-steep-cost-estimates)

~~~
thrownaway2424
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
> 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.

~~~
megablast
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
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.

------
IsaacL
"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
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.

------
brianmcconnell
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
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.

------
ilaksh
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
"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.

------
Animats
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.

