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Comment by c1sc0 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not now but it certainly will be in a few years for the simple reason that they rebuild everything from scratch and can leapfrog technologies. China doesn't care about being backwards-compatible: they'll just tear down & rebuild whole districts every few years. And they still have the cheap labour to do it at a far faster pace than any public infrastructure project in the western world.

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Yes, I second that (living in China, they redo ring roads overnight here). I also heard that in China in one year they currently build more kilometers of bridges than in US they build kilometers of highways. (No link to back that, just a hearsay.)

Does China have have many American style highways? When I visited Beijing and area - the multilane roads weren't connected with overpasses and ramps like the American system. This resulted in incredibly slow traffic. Also results in things like the 100km+ traffic jam they had this summer.

Their subway system in Beijing was very large and well connected but was still overcrowded to the point of being unusable during rush hour.

Such a large population - must be an engineers dream.

Such a large population - must be an engineers dream.

Love those words. I think the same. All those deficiencies in India and China, they are great technical and business opportunities to be tapped. Just massive opportunities that will keep growing at a fast clip for decades to come.

Now, now, don't get me wrong guys. There is nothing wrong with helping people and making money in the process. That's also the sustainable way to make lives better.

I had the same feeling when visiting New-York. Their highways have overpasses. What you saw in Beijing is probably not highways, it is just the normal 8-lanes roads that squares the city. Traffic is a mess in the city, for sure. I heard they sell 1000 new cars everyday in Beijing, so it is not an easy task to dissolve the jam. They have a law forbidding every car one day per week, based on your plate number, so wealthy people buy two, and less wealthy use public transport or bike once a week at least.

I agree that traffic in Beijing is a mess. My impression was that Shanghai has slightly better transportation infrastructure, both road & rail.

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