So naturally Beijing held an international car show last year to present the newest and sexiest cars from around the world to the city's growiing number or affluent urbanities. The cars were absolutely gorgeous... and so were some of the models.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Sexy Cars
I'm sure I have already elaborated on the horrid road conditions in Beijing. Feichang duche or bad traffic is so common and consistent throughout the day, rush hour traffic has lost its meaning. In 1996 the city's roads only catered to roughly 300,000 cars - since then the number of drivers has risen to 3.5 million with 1,200 new cars on the road every day. Of course, Beijing planners thinks that if you build more highways, the problem will be solved...wrong. The city's layout has fundamental flaws including a lack of multiple centralized business centers and an incomplete grid system. To clarify, a city with a grid has blocks. In New York you can walk around a four sided block in 5 minutes. In Beijing, 30 to 40 minutes. For example, my apartment building is in the middle of a block - its about 2 or 3 football fields to the closest city street. So if New York was anything like Beijing, there would be half as many avenues and the only navigatable streets would be 20th street, 30th street, 40th street, and so on.
So naturally Beijing held an international car show last year to present the newest and sexiest cars from around the world to the city's growiing number or affluent urbanities. The cars were absolutely gorgeous... and so were some of the models.
So naturally Beijing held an international car show last year to present the newest and sexiest cars from around the world to the city's growiing number or affluent urbanities. The cars were absolutely gorgeous... and so were some of the models.
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2 comments:
You touched upon two important and interesting topics: (i) the traffic condition in Beijing, and (ii) beautiful models at car shows. Regarding the first one, I cannot tell you now why Beijing's traffic is so bad. You blamed on the lack of multiple business centers and imcomplete grid systems. I am not sure that I can agree with such simple analysis though. First of all, if you go to the west part of Beijing, which is not business center, you would still find a lot of traffic there. And actually Beijing is spreading out its CBD locations. Second of all, Beijing is the best city in terms of planning streets. The fact that your apartment is far away from the closest gate definitely adds a lot of inconvenience to your life, but I doubt that has anything to do with the traffic here.
The second topic is more entertaining - I happened to visit the car show here in Beijing in 2007, and was stunned by how lovely those models were. But there were just too many people at the exhibition center, so I am not sure whether my breathlessness was more due to the astonishing beauty of the young models or simply suffocation.
L.X.
Li, the grid system in Beijing is crap at least compared to New York. The width of manhattan (with 12+ north-south avenues) is equivalent to the distance between the 2nd ring road and Dawanglu (4 north-south avenues). So when I travel towards downtown in New York there are a slew of avenues I can take. If I want to get from Sanyuan Qiao to Yongan Li, I have three options (2nd ring road, XiuShui Donglu, and the 3rd Ring Road - that's it). The area between NorthEast 3rd Ring Road and Jianguomenwai Dajie (4 miles) only has 6 east-west streets while in New York the same area would have 82 east-west streets. If we had 82 east-west streets in all of Beijing alone, we would be in much better shape in terms of traffic congestion than we are in now.
This is not necessarily the governmnets fault considering how ancient the city is and how the middle of the city is covered in unmoveable parks and temples creating a "doughnut" city... but to say Beijing is the best city for planning streets is a bombastic remark void of any attentiveness to the axioms of urban planning. In my world travels from LA and Mumbai to London and Hong Kong, I have never seen anything like this.
Silly rabbit, never challenge someone in the real estate industry who is addicted to Google Earth.
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