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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

“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

I believe the first low-speed maglev will be running this year. 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...

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They are paranoid about Uighers, ya. Also, it just feels like something china would do even if there was really no good reason for it.

For a domestic flight in China they made me discard a small bottle of children's moltrin. Seems pretty US-imitative to me.

The Chinese TSA is the best one in the world for finding...lighters. Really, second to none. Of course everyone else just allows them.

No, cops setting up shop just inside the subway station and doing spot checks of passengers' bags is not uncommon.

The security lines are not a big bottleneck at most stations in Beijing. There are rush hour peaks at some stations (e.g. wudaokou).

My wife often has a 30-40 minute wait at liangmaoqiao during peak travel time. This is just to get in the station.

God forbid if you ever have to transfer at xizhimen; I never thought it was possible to wait in line so long to take a subway.

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).

Agreed. Modern big cities are just worker hives. Better to choose a place for quality of life and whatever makes you smile.

> 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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Gorges_Dam#Relocation_of...

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.

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?

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.

> capital of 5+ ancient Chinese dynasties

I know ther's Qing, Ming, and Yuan (Dadu). Not sure about any others.

> The Chinese government moves people around by fiat

Man, that seems inefficient, fiats can hold like 3 people tops

(bad pun, sorry)

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.

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.

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.

I've been in 10km of stop-and-go traffic plenty of times in the US.

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.

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