Transportation Solutions for Billions

First of all, a disclaimer: this is still just a proposal.

But now the cool stuff. Beijing is looking at a way of providing more mass transit that doesn’t add to congestion (in a city that already packs them in like sardines) by putting their … what is it, a bus? Rail line? … above the traffic.

See the video here. It’s in Chinese, but the graphics make the point clear: A transit system that runs on rails that allows vehicle traffic to pass underneath.

Two thoughts:

One: Can you imagine the outcry if we were to try something like this in Seattle? Everything from NIMBYs complaining about their view to planning department eggheads who would see it as a way to get more people to drive out of their way to a park-and-ride lot would insure that it would never get built. (See also Monorail, Seattle, 2005).

Two: Once the Chinese establishment gets behind an idea, it happens, often at a scale that dwarfs anything anyone else has done. See here. And here. And here.

A nation of a billion-plus people, whose economy is now all-but-officially the second-largest in the world (for how long?), where labor costs are still a fraction of those in the west, which is sending thousands of students through our university system (54,000 science and engineering students in 2009, according to the National Science Foundation), and supported by a business-government complex that combines communist-style uniformity and central planning with a capitalist-style adventurism and profit-motive and a nationalist-style do-it-for-the-motherland ethos… well, I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of interesting ideas and developments coming out of China in the future.