As a city design enthusiast who has been thinking about car-based infrastructure Longer than I’ve been thinking about communism, I am curious to hear the story from people living in China about daily commutes or just getting around for daily activities in a major Chinese city.
By the way, since this isn’t a communism-specific question, let me know if there is a particular social media that you think is great for asking these kinds of question without getting sinophobic nonsense. For now, this is about the only place I think I’m going to get a good answer Ha ha.
So back to the question. Specifically, I’m thinking about people living directly in the city, but then also living on the outskirts. Are there things like suburbs in China? I definitely have heard about cities and rural differences, but I haven’t heard of anything along the lines of suburbs or what those suburbs look like.
China has the best high speed rail in the entire world, as far as I’ve ever heard. I think Sweden has some good high speed rail, but it doesn’t serve 1.4 billion people heh. But do they have more regional trains? Do they have commuter trains? Is it basically just car-based commuting? Are there massive traffic jams during rush hour like you would see in the West? Is biking very popular? And or electric scooters, electric bikes, segues, or other micro-imability transportation?
Okay, that’s a lot of details. If you have a link to a blog that has talked about this, I’ll totally read through that as well.
In Shanghai, you can usually get around using public transportation (bus, subway, ferry), shared bicycles (electric and non-electric), or electric scooters, these are the cheaper options. The more expensive options are using ride-hailing apps, taxi services, or driving your own car.
There are areas outside the main city area of Shanghai that resemble “suburbs” or what we call “城乡结合部”, large patches of residential areas that consist of mostly one to three-story tall houses, some of the areas haven’t been covered by the subway system yet. Here you can still get around using buses, electric scooters, bicycles (if the distance is short or you really want to). There are still office buildings, malls, commercial streets in these “suburbs”.
China’s high-speed rail have train numbers with D/G prefix, but there are still normal-speed trains with T/K/Z prefix (or even no prefix) for intercity travel.
As for traffic jams caused by cars, this is not a problem unique to any political system, it is a city-planning and engineering problem.
My opinion of cars is while they are convenient for family/group travel and carrying baggage, they take up too much space on the road and require lots of dedicated parking space. Maybe they should be designed differently in future.
Hey, thanks for responding. I think you’ve responded to some of my questions before.
Yeah, city planning can obviously be informed by politics, but being socialist makes no guarantees to good, car-free living standards or anything like that.
It does sound like there’s more options for getting around than in a typical usa city. And depending on the size of the suburbs and how many things are in close proximity, there are probably even more options in the suburbs than in usa.
