On average, the Chinese cities that we visit have 10+ million inhabitants. They all live, eat, work and have parties on relative small areas. Imagine what this means. In the morning a few million people commute in Chengdu, Chongqing, Beijing, Shanghai to their work. This means that in China a traffic jam is lots of traffic and even more jam. In the CBD parts of Beijing and in Shanghai 2x5 =10 lane roads have been developed to transport all these people to their work and in the evening back home again. But there are still huge traffic jams. Not strange that Chinese often warn you for their famous rush hours. In order to escape such rush hours, last week I had to leave the hotel at 6.15 AM to be in time at the airport for a flight that was due at 11.00 AM. Transport time from the hotel to the airport outside rush hours is about 45 minutes. During rush hours??? Nobody could tell me exactly but the estimates are between 2 and 3 hours. And rush hour starts at about 6.30-7 AM. Hence the advice was to leave the hotel before 6.30 AM. So there I was on the airport at 7 AM and had to wait for 2 hours before I could check in. But I would have been late if I would have left at 7 or later. What is the Chinese answer to this logistical problem and what can we learn from this? Looking at the huge roads, the first answer was to build roads. In the large cities you find a lot of ring roads in and around the city. However, these did not stop the problem. Therefore in a number of Chinese cities you notice large investments in public transport systems, in particular in metro transport. And the metro systems in Beijing and Shanghai are extremely efficient. Everything is bi-lingual, buying a ticket is extremely simple (it took me much more time to buy a ticket in Munich than in Beijing) and the transfer from one line to another is organized in a very efficient way. The Olympic games in Beijing and the coming world expo in Shanghai (expected amount of visitors is 70+ million) have been very helpful in the development of this public transport.
In Shanghai I was talking about this with Elmer Sterken, dean of the faculty of economics and business from the University of Groningen. He argued that at this moment we see in China what will happen in the Randstad in a couple of years. Too much traffic and continuous traffic jams. And we can also see what we can learn from this: building more and ever larger roads will not solve our file problems in the Netherlands.