As Beijing Becomes a Supercity, the Rapid Growth Brings Pains

> "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 :(

How much do you actually take NY area commuter rail or Bos-NY-Wash corridor trains? It sounds comparable to what you describe.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.