Posts about China

Emissions kill: Thanks mainly to rising car ownership in China and India, air pollution is one of the fastest-growing causes of death in the world. (Motherboard) (Comment)

China following our mistakes: China is avidly building infrastructure and making the same mistakes the US did—too many freeways, bland apartment blocks. With its population, the concomitant problems will be far worse than here. (Foreign Policy) (Comment)

And...: China is urbanizing at an astounding rate. (Atlantic Cities) ... Don't try sliding down Metro escalators. (City Paper) ... University of Maryland students save a campus shuttle route. (Patch) (Comment)

Gray flies to China on the cheap: Mayor Gray will be in China this week to meet with Chinese officials and to attend a sustainability conference. Gray and his accompanying officials will be traveling coach, without security guards, and have made available the cost to DC public. (DCist) (Comment)

Hong Kong becomes mega-region without unity: Hong Kong and the rest of the Pearl Delta are merging into a mega-region, despite a great variety in political systems. The variation between the role of government in Hong Kong, Shenzhen and Macau make the Washington area extremely homogenous in comparison. (Atlantic Cities) (Comment)

And...: Local business groups want more Maryland infrastructure funding. (Post) ... Is efficiency or look and feel more important to transportation planning? (Slate) ... China unveils the largest bus in the world, and it looks like a Circulator. (Digital Trends) (Comment)

Slowing China's trains: While China excels at splashy high-speed trains, its low-speed train system and back-end management is what needs the investment. (Economist) (Comment)

Drivers are the real socialists?: Andrew Sullivan points out a few posts exploring subsidy to motorists. In China, a transit trip is cheaper than a liter of gasoline; in the US it's the reverse. (The Daily Dish, Steve S) (Comment)

And...: Bolivia's leftist president wants to legalize stolen cars because, "We all have a right to have a car." (MercoPress, Garrett B.) ... A NYC-based group is trying to design a pool that would float in the river and automatically purify river water to fill the pool. (Kickstarter) ... China is cloning an Austrian village. (Providence Journal) (Comment)

Bicycling

Weekend video: World's biggest bike share

by David Alpert • June 5, 2011 10:25 am

Capital Bikeshare is the largest bike sharing system in the United States, but do you know where the world's largest is? Paris, with 20,600 bikes?

Nope; it's in Hangzhou, China, and this Streetfilm shows how the Chinese are using its 51,500 bikes to take 240,000 trips a day.

Hangzhou is smaller than New York City, so a 50,000 bike sharing system would be a good and entirely achievable goal for New York. Meanwhile, Hangzhou is striving to grow to 175,000 bikes by 2020.

14 comments

Tags: bike sharing, China, Hangzhou

We're worse than Beijing?: The editor of China Daily says the DC Metro compares unfavorably to Beijing's after riding on a crowded train on a weekend. I don't know how impartial their state-controlled media are, but at least China is willing to suitably invest in its transit infrastructure. (AltTransport) (Comment)

And...: Don't forget Greater Greater Washington's 3rd birthday party tonight at RFD in Chinatown! ... The Guangzhou BRT won the 2011 Sustainable Transport award last night. The system is only 23 km long, but carries 800,000 passengers per day. (Transportation Nation) ... A 2-year-old who's "obsessed" with Seattle's trolleybuses got a bus-shaped cake for his birthday, with candles forming the trolley poles. (Treehugger) (Comment)

Poor travelers can't pay for China's HSR: Long distance passenger traffic in China is mostly migrant workers, who can't afford the new HSR trains. Bus travel is exploding as they switch from the cheaper, but much slower, passenger trains. Doesn't sound too different from the Northeast Corridor. Coming next on Megabus: Shanghai. (China Daily, charlie) (Comment)

And...: It was finally confirmed that Tommy Wells will replace Jim Graham on the WMATA Board. (WTOP) ... China is instituting quotas on car ownership to curb ballooning traffic (Bloomberg, Steve S.) ... When Winston Churchill was hit by a car and its driver in Manhattan in 1931. (Andrew Sullivan) (Comment)

And...: Why won't the US get high speed rail like the Chinese? Because the US isn't China, says Megan McArdle. Duh. (The Atlantic) ... With a new President, will the UMD get on board the Campus Drive Purple Line? (All Opinions are Local, Joey) ... The century-old Longfellow Bridge, connecting downtown Boston across the Charles River to Cambridge, may get a major boost in bike and pedestrian capacity. (Boston Globe) (Comment)

And...: Is Chinese development really more sustainably oriented that Americas was? If so, despite all of Beijing's legendarily bad traffic - where are the bicycles? (Salon) ... New legislation in California will allow private vehicle owners to lease their vehicles into car sharing programs. (San Francisco Chronicle, charlie) ... A Dutch company has developed a new method to quickly and neatly install brick/stone roadways. (MetaFilter, andrew) (Comment)

Embassy wants parking to buy more cars: The Chinese Embassy wants neighbors to support a request for more parking (huge PDF) at their 2300 Connecticut Avenue site. It turns out the Chinese allow their diplomats to buy cars in the US, then send them back to China duty-free. (Dupont Current, Geoff H.) (Comment)

And...: NYC bicyclists talk about the pros and cons of bike lanes (The Atlantic) ... Chinese HSR is on track (Financial Times) ... Who should be the next Mall food vendor? (The Internationalist) (Comment)

And you thought the Beltway was bad: England's Daily Mail has an update on China's epic 11-day traffic jam, with some fantastic photos. Helps you understand why the Federal government invests in freight rail. (Daily Mail Online) (Comment)

And on the ninth day: Ever wonder what might happen when you shift massive numbers of people to a less space-efficient form of transportation? A giant 9-day traffic jam has developed in China, and some officials say it could last a whole month. Hopefully the response will be to reduce the numbers of cars instead of just building more lanes. (TIME, David Alpert) (Comment)

Performance parking in the park: Yantai Park in China's Shangdong province has instituted a pay-to-sit scheme on some popular park benches. If a park patron does not pay up for their posterior, sharp spikes will poke them from the bench seat. Park officials were inspired by an installation by a German artist who was protesting the commercialization and indignities of modern life. (Orange News, Vimeo, AJ) (Comment)

Transit

China proposes car-straddling buses (or are they trains?)

by David Alpert • August 4, 2010 9:51 am

Many, many people have sent in tips about this project in China to build huge buses the width of two car lanes, which can run on guideways straddling the road and travel above the cars:

But wouldn't it be easier just to dedicate a bus lane? Via the Huffington Post.

Update: Several commenters have also pointed out that, despite the Huffington Post headline, since this will run on rails it's really a train, not a bus.

55 comments

Tags: buses, China

Flip it: A Dutch firm designed a cool bridge to switch traffic from one side of the road to the other when crossing between Hong Kong and mainland China. But wouldn't it be cheaper and simpler to just do this on land? (Fast Company via The Straight Line) (Comment)

So high-speed, it never stops: A Chinese bullet train concept would not stop at stations, instead dropping off small transfer vehicles and picking up new ones while maintaining speed. (David C) (I've seen this video before, but you might not have.) (Comment)

Electric bikes turning deadly: Electric-powered bicycles are becoming popular in China, but with the growth in the vehicles is coming a spike in fatalities as speeding riders crash into regular cyclists and pedestrians. (WSJ, Ben) (Comment)

Salute to pedestrian safety: Officials too often try to solve pedestrian safety problems by getting pedestrians out of the way of cars, even at the cost of longer walks. But one Chinese school came up with a solution to top them all: requiring all children to salute every passing car while walking to and from school. (NYT, ah) (Comment)