Shanghai blogger Wang Jianshuo points out a less-than-expected reason why riding the bus is faster than driving on his commute: ad hoc protest against traffic enforcement:
Bus drivers don't follow the traffic rule as strictly as other car drivers. They just drive wildly, and policemen tend not to care about them. Why? I saw some cases when the policeman stops the bus, and the whole bunch of people on the bus surrounded the policeman and protest to ask the policeman release the driver.
This comes in addition to a more engineered factor, the bus-only lane on highways. People bending rules both help and hurt bus travel speeds in Wang's post. Above, they prevent bus drivers from being punished for illegal expediency. But meanwhile, as Wang notes, lots of private cars violate the bus only lane. The bright side is that the bus lane still remains fast enough to increase efficiency.
Much has been made of Beijing's decision to keep a lighter version of its Olympics traffic restrictions, not least because whatever the city did to clean the air seemed to have worked in August. But the renewed measures are weaker and the probable effect is unclear.
Alex Pasternack at Treehugger points out that the sustained restrictions, which took effect October 1, will be weaker than during the Games. Only one fifth of cars will be pulled from the road on weekdays, versus half under the Olympics rules.
According to The Beijinger (also via Alex), the city's other restrictions include:
- Restricting the number of car license plates issued for the city every year to 100,000--one fourth of the current rate of new car registration. This may in the long run be the most powerful measure, because it will reduce the extent to which increased wealth leads many people to obtain cars.
- Raising parking prices. If it costs more to park, maybe people will take the...
- Growing public transportation network. Lines five, ten, eight, and the airport express opened in the year leading up to the Olympics. Expansions of existing lines and other new lines are planned in the next two to three years.
But it's hard to tell whether the automobile and transportation efforts were really the core of Beijing's cleaner skies during the Olympics. For one thing, it's useful to remember that before a series of rainstorms, many people didn't feel the skies were particularly clear. Afterward, opinion among those used to standard Beijing air was uniformly laudatory. The rain may have helped clean things up.
It is difficult to assess, too, how important the other measures taken around the Olympics were. Manufacturing was slowed or stopped all over the region. Some of the dirtier power plants were shut. (Some may still be shut, but reports indicate that much of the industry has reopened.)
And significantly, dust from construction, a major fact of life in contemporary Beijing, was halted, because construction was halted. Though the surge of building that led up to the Olympics will probably not be matched in the near future in that city, some construction will restart.
So, to the extent that the sustained restrictions on driving decrease people's emitting behavior, that's great, but only time (and reliable measurements of air quality over time) will give a fair estimate of the effect.
The days of tissue-thin tickets collected by human attendants are over in Beijing's underground. Riders on Monday were greeted by electronic ticketing with automatic gates.
When Beijing's Line 5 debuted in October last year, riders found out what they could expect, as new electronic gates were installed but not yet unfurled. Travelers in Asia will recognize the mechanisms from Hong Kong and Shanghai.
Beijing's new subway ticketing system was previewed with the opening of Line 5 in October 2007. They came into service June 9, 2008.
(Credit: Graham Webster)Besides removing the human factor from ticket sales and collection, a feat accomplished already with debit-based ticketing cards that have been in place for quite a while, the system puts Beijing in league with advanced systems that can use rider data to adjust service.
According to People's Daily:
As the new system requires passengers to check in and out electronically, it records precisely their entry and departing stations. This enables us to accurately record passenger flow on each line and station.
"The subway company can adjust train schedules to ease traffic. This is especially important when the Olympic Games are held in August in Beijing," Zhang said.
I'm looking forward to giving the new system a shot this week.
On the train in Japan, "green" does not refer to the environment. Nor to the color of money, as the extreme amounts necessary to buy "green" tickets there are colored in the generally neutral tones of 10,000 yen bills. Soon there will be "super-green" to take even more of your hard-earned gray.
East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) will introduce super-first class cars on a new extension to its bullet train routes in 2010. The luxuries, according to the Japanese paper Mainichi Shimbun, are to exceed the already comfy-looking green cars on the tracks.
The newer trains will also have a new maximum speed of 320kph (199mph). After a two-week trip enjoying the all-country JR train pass (which cost me, but was worth it), I wonder who could possibly need a more luxurious train than the already clean, orderly, and quiet cars I had on even the less expensive Hikari trains.
Then again, who pays for first class on Virgin Air?
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