More Development Options

I’m currently in Taiyuan, the capital city of Shanxi Province which contains about 34 million people. For reference, California is almost 40 million people. Taiyuan is a moderately sized city at about 4 million, but even at that population level it is fairly compact and hyper dense.

One of the things that I noticed when I came to China last year to visit my wife’s family was the vertical hyper density. I don’t think one really appreciates the scale of it, especially given the horizontal sprawl of American cities only seen from airplanes and aerial photographs. New York approaches this in Manhattan, but Taiyuan is a city the size of the Seattle Tacoma region just on a much smaller footprint.

But as I mentioned last year, as China becomes richer and more people drive cars, it becomes more congested. I should note these are just casual observations based on what I’ve seen. I won’t pretend to be an expert on China or the regions I visit, but I have noticed that there are way more two and three wheelers here riding the side bike lanes in addition to transit (bus and rail) which likely lessens the pressure.

Even in a city like Taiyuan, there are two subway lines, with plans for seven, and all the major streets have significant space given over to vehicles smaller than cars.

But I’ll say again, the scale of the development and the sheer amount of people is something I don’t think anyone can prepare for until they experience it. I live in a city, but San Francisco is nothing like this, even if you feel crushed on BART at rush hour.

I do hope more people get to experience places like Taiyuan to understand there are many different ways of doing things. That’s not to say that this way is better than another but until someone knows what the development and growth choices actually are, they might just go with what we think we know. Maybe we should have more options.

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