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.
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.
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 :(
I think it's also what the article wants to say in the end. Speed overcomes distance, and reasonably structured public transport solves most connection problems. I'd agree, also having the experience of how connected Hangzhou and Shanghai are thanks to the fast trains (and busses, if the train is full)
Boston is almost 3 times as far from NY as Beijing is from Tianjin. Trenton, on the other hand, can be gotten to in under an hour and for $40. I just did a quick search and found that the Beijing-Tianjin fare is actually about $15, not $6.
So it does seem on paper that China has Amtrak beat by an economic factor of 2-3x, but this is also before you factor in local purchasing parity and so on.
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:
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yup. And the bus described was an inter-city bus, not a bus within Beijing. Buses in Beijing are often full, but it's rare for a bus to be so full that some passengers must wait for the next one.
Not rare at all, especially on chang'an jie. Still, not as bad as coming from miyun, I've toured up there a few times and getting the bus back to Beijing always requires at least an hour wait in line...on the weekend (many people probably have the same idea to go out, it is nice up there).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As well as pollution that have increased risks of cancer and premature death in Beijing (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.
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.
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.
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.
I was in Germany, when there was a traffic jam blocking the way from just outside Munich most of the way to Hamburg. A 5 hour trip took over 10 hours, and that is because we moved onto the back streets.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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/ - 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.