Chinese here. First of all thanks a lot for your videos, since Chinese style urbanism is so rarely talked about here. However, there is actually a big problem with Chinese suburbs (since you mentioned that you like it), which is the existence of gated communities (with condo towers) that render a lot of communities unwalkable. Sometimes they occupy a huge swath of land, which means you need to either walk four or five hundred feet before you can get anything. They look mixed used at first glance, but the residential itself is mostly single used, make it hostile for walking in reality. However, these escooters (moped style) are super useful in such circumstances, which probably is one of the reason why they are so widely used in China.
Huh. Sounds surprisingly similar to North American suburban land use patterns, in that you often get parcels of land build on by separate developers, with little thought being put into walking / cycling connections between them (or even steps taken to actively prevent such connections). Just with huge difference in the density of development within those parcels, obviously.
My sister-in-law lives in a gated condo complex. As you say, they're all over in the suburbs. For vehicles and to a lesser extent mopeds, they kind of function like the superblocks in Barcelona. But, unlike the superblocks, for the most part they don't allow pedestrians to pass through. I wasn't walking around the condo complex enough to really appreciate their strengths and weaknesses. Compared to North America suburbs, I like the higher density, mixed use on the main streets, and transit access that you find in Chinese suburbs. However, I didn't like that the streets are very big, which will encourage more driving.
@@yizhouwang3645 It's just warning about fire in general, not specific to mopeds: "Hidden fire is more dangerous than visible fire, prevention is better than reaction, duty is as important as Taishan"
The first thing that surprised me in Shanghai (pudong side) was the massive amount of greenery despite the size of the city. Yes, there are only high density buildings and everything is incredibly walking friendly, but there is space between them which they don't simply fill with roads. The density in India and SE Asia is a very different level in my experience. Even though the planning may be at a provincial level, all cities I've been to are remarkably similar in terms of the dedicated bike lanes and sidewalks for every road. The width of roads is also quite interesting, they're certainly much wider than American and European urban planners are building lately or have ever built. But despite this due to the restricted access they don't quite fall into the stroad category despite the large number of vehicle lanes.
China has gone very hard into wholesale demolition and redevelopment of cities, so most of the big cities are made up of huge scale, master-planned newer development as opposed to the more chaotic, organic development in other Asian countries
Great video! My friend recently biked 3000km across China from Inner Mongolia to Shanghai and had a great experience overall - mostly very respectful drivers in these rural areas compared to the US.
I spent two weeks in China in May, visiting Shanghai, Nanjing and Huangshan to spend time with a friend who was studying there for a year. I was honestly blown away by how good the bike infrastructure was, especially in Nanjing. There were large protected bike lines on nearly every bigger street, most of which were separated by hedges, trees or flowers. Some bike/ moped lanes were so big that they were bigger than the Main Street of my German home town, just on one side. I distinctly remember one time there was a bike lane so wide, that they managed to fit an entire bus stop in it and still had a lot of space for bikes and mopeds to pass. Definitely way better than the bike lanes we got here at home and probably the best I’ve ever felt while biking.
I dunno if it's your soothing voice or the quality of the infrastructure, but I wasn't stressed for your safety looking at your footage, unlike most North American TH-cam videos. I used shared bikes in Shanghai quite a bit and the critical mass of 2 wheelers always reassures me that motorists are at least aware of their existence.
i was very fortunate to have experience the protected bike lane wonder back in 2011 in Beijing (core city, around ring roads and along hutongs) and in Shanghai in 2012. This brings me back! Thank you for the comparative analysis!
I really like your video and the holistic approach. Biking is not just made better be protectect lanes but the entire urban fabric and driver behavior needs to be improved to reduce distances and improve life. Please do more videos on China. It will help us to see the shortcomings at home and give interesting ideas on what works and what doesn't.
Thank you, this was extremely interesting! I've been pretty fascinated lately with chinese bike urbanism, one thing that does always strike to me is the apparent lack of road markings for bikes, arguably more useful and effective to those on a bicycle and other types of micro mobility than vertical signage. I think this too depends based on the province you're in? Thanks again for the insights and will watch the next videos.
I grew up in China my first 10 years, I remember because of the high population, lane markings don't mean much, people will squeeze thru whatever openings are available. That probably applies to the bike lanes too.
so basically every Chinese municipality has their own approach to micro-mobility (I'm not using the word bike because E-bikes are becoming as popular if not an absolute majority of micro-mobility devices compared to bikes); Beijing reallocated some of its insanely wide avenues to have protected 3 meter micro-mobility lanes alongside roads; Foshan has green painted micro mobility lanes along roads and painted intersections; Guangzhou uses plastic barriers along roads for micro-mobility and has some intersections, while adding dedicated ramps for bridges for micro-mobility; I've seen Harbin has some examples of Dutch-style protected and painted intersections but at a huge scale; Many "New Districts" have added recreational paved bike lanes to sidewalks; etc... and China changes fast so these approaches are all rapidly evolving and taking lessons from one another
5:51 mixed-use buildings are a central necessity for walkable neighborhoods. With strictly residential zoning street life is dead as there are no destinations for people to go to other than their own home, which is just one building out of many. With shops and small businesses all around a car-free or car-lite lifestyle becomes possible.
At 1:25 I immediately recognize the TV tower from Wuwei. Since all of my family members up until me are from this city, It’s comforting to see the city again on TH-cam while in Canada. I’m a road cyclist myself too, it’s such a treat to see this video. Keep up the good work 👍.
As someone original from Anhui Province, I really appreciate you taking time to introduce TH-cam how the urban fabric and micro mobility looks like. My hometown has a lot in common with the small city Wuwei showing in your video, and I would say 90% people pick moped/bike to get to places within the urban/suburban area because the conveniece of parking, traffic and strictly enforced traffic laws(you can easily get fines for $40 for 10% speeding or park in undesinated spot). The car ownership in China has actually reached all time high and most family I know have owned at least one car. But people will only choose driving when it's neccessary like raining day, shopping in wholesale stores or going back to rural homes where grandparents lives. We don't have as impressive public transport because massive availability of biking and sharing bike program(and pretty cheap). This is ok when we mostly move around compact urban area like you can ride mopad to cross town in 30 mins. But what's really missing is the regional transport to connect more remote places. Regional rails are almost non-exist in my place. Don't get me wrong, we have great intercity rail network but not so much to connect nearby city boroughs and counties. Most case you have reply on someone's lift or hours long mopad ride in wide roads next to high speed vehichles unless you own a car.
I lived in Chengdu for a year and the bike infrastructure was so much better than anything I’ve expected in North America. Sure there are also electric mopeds in the bike lanes but it wasn’t a big deal imo. I think China is severely unappreciated by urbanists when it comes to bike infrastructure .
before the 1990s, bicycles were overwhelmingly the most common form of transportation (especially in the big cities); there are old photos of entire streets full of bicycle commuters. Cycling is an integral part of modern Chinese transportation!
Thanks for your valuable sharing. I've lived in a 3rd-tier city in the GD province, southern CN, where I've completed multiple inter-cities tours thru urban/rural roads, as well as frequent local commuting. I'd say the biking situations there is very unpredictable. Often did I find myself in bike lanes with e-scooters coming at me in the opposite direction. Riding on the sidewalk was a common thing with the much absence of bike lanes and the abundance of unkept ones. On the flipped side, it's fairly easy to find supplies/services or a pick-up in worse case scenario. The increase of popularity of cycling as a sport/commuting in recent years also helps. It's not rare to share the road with someone who has the same hobby, be him/her a driver/pedestrian, who would most likely be more considerate than someone who's not a cyclist. It's a pretty light-hearted and awesome experience to have biked in CN.
In my opinion, many new roads (around new suburban development) seem overbuilt with more car lanes than necessary. Although they usually come with proteced bike lanes, and I like protected cycle lanes as much as any urbanist, I perfer narrow, mixed traffic street in some situation, as they are easier to cross and form a nicer street environment due to lower car speed.
Nice video, so far I only bike in Beijing during layovers and I've been pretty impressed so far by their bike infrastructure even if it's far from perfect. But honestly the most impressive fact for me is how quiet streets are in central Beijing because they banned gas motorcycles and pushed drivers to buy EVs....
EVs unfortunately arent a solution to traffic or pollution, public transit is. A city center with a million EVs is a million times more stressfull to bike and walk in than a city center that bans cars.
@@cooltwittertag Yeah good point, but it's already better than petrol cars and scooters.... Personally I think that electric scooters like they have everywhere in Beijing is pretty awesome and very cost efficient.
Particularly at 6:26. There's no signals telling you if you can proceed or not. I would guess you're supposed to hop onto the pavement (which doesn't seem wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists to share), then wait for the signal to use the pedestrian crossing? I would bet that even after you wait for that signal, you would still find drivers encroaching on the crossing, because as I understand it right turns on a red light are generally legal in China. This surely all adds up to an experience where you feel like you feel like the whole environment is designed for cars, and could create a perception that bikes are just for losers who can't afford to drive.
Fascinating. I've always been curious about cycling in China since it seemed to have a big cycling boom in the 20th century. It seems unlike North America they're getting transportation right.
It seems to me there's little traffic in the big cities. I would expect significantly more mopeds, pedestrians, cars and also significantly more honking.
In my experience, the big cities usually have lots of very broad avenues. So when there's no traffic things are great, but traffic feels much worse than similarly built up areas in many other similar or more developed countries.
Could you say anything about how this compares to European cycling leaders like The Netherlands and Denmark? Like in The Netherlands, China seems to mix in pedal cycles with light motorcycles. Does that ever cause conflict, and how is that resolved? And are cyclists more or less separated from pedestrians? And from cars? And what are social attitudes to cycling? Is it seen as a form of poverty that people try to escape from, or is it seen as natural that successful people also use bikes for transportation?
This is coming. Driving/biking behaviours in China are much different than what I'm used to in North America and what I've experienced in the Netherlands.
In China, two-wheeled electric vehicles have been managed as bicycles since the first day. In fact, the first two-wheeled electric vehicles can be pedaled, and the motor only helps. You don't need any license to drive a two-wheeled electric vehicle.
A lot of these roads could be improved by just switching the position of car parking a bit. Car parking should never be "protected" by bike lanes, it should always be the other way around. If I get hit by a car door, I'd rather be knocked into the pavement instead of knocked into traffic. It's also unfortunate to see cycling infrastructure giving up exactly when you need it most, at junctions.
Many bikers in China just ignore the stop line at junctions. They would go forward as possible, usually blocking the path of pedestrians and right-turning cars. That's why at some junctions cycling infrastructures are intentionally removed: to force them to stop in the right place.
This is so incredibly well designed compared to india. Really drives home that population is an excuse for us to have bad design favoring the growing car market.
There are few bikes to be seen in this video tho. They are mostly mopeds. And idk why but a lot of the city infrastructure looks very inhospitable to pedestrians and cyclists
They have the best and the worst urban planning out there, fascinating, though. I hope they will take the path towards slowing down, safety and ecology and not cars everywhere!
I almost laughed when you said you didn't feel any stress on the 2 lane outskirt road. Those are the places that accidents happen frequently. Naturally if the road is wide, driver's instinct is to give bikes space since they may swerve. But if two trucks were to cross each other, or overtake, they wouldn't care. The speed limit is 80 kmh, down to 40 in urban area, but that kind of road just begs to be sped on.
It does seem, at least on first impressions based on this short video, that compliance with speed limits is pretty good. Which makes me wonder if there is there average speed tracking or something like that? We know that in North America or Europe that on big roads with multiple lanes and not much traffic, the speed limits would absolutely just be treated as a suggestion.
@liamness Even if the speed limit is complied, roads like that got tons of intersections with even agricultural vehicles, so safe speed should be even lower. And speed cameras can't be installed everywhere, especially on smaller roads like this, doubly so if drivers know the location or have apps that show speed traps.
@@zannierzan9634 Surely it wouldn't be a surprise if speed cameras were every intersection in Chinese cities, it's a surveillance state. You can get automatic fines through WeChat for using your phone at the wheel, or jaywalking (which I don't agree should even be an offence, but whatever), so why not speeding also?
Likely a positive opinion. The vast majority of people in the bike lanes were on mopeds. The mopeds all tended to go at 30 km/h so the speed differential wasn't that big. Also, since I saw very few people on bicycles, the bike lanes might not exist if people on mopeds couldn't use them. Attitudes on space and right of way are also vastly different in China than what I'm used to in North America, but that's a topic for an upcoming video.
I don't think you could ever describe such cities as car dependent, given they have dense walkable neighbourhoods and good transit provision. Car dominated, perhaps.
Chinese here. First of all thanks a lot for your videos, since Chinese style urbanism is so rarely talked about here. However, there is actually a big problem with Chinese suburbs (since you mentioned that you like it), which is the existence of gated communities (with condo towers) that render a lot of communities unwalkable. Sometimes they occupy a huge swath of land, which means you need to either walk four or five hundred feet before you can get anything. They look mixed used at first glance, but the residential itself is mostly single used, make it hostile for walking in reality. However, these escooters (moped style) are super useful in such circumstances, which probably is one of the reason why they are so widely used in China.
in 8:29 there is a banner warning about the fire risks probably of these e-mopeds lol
Huh. Sounds surprisingly similar to North American suburban land use patterns, in that you often get parcels of land build on by separate developers, with little thought being put into walking / cycling connections between them (or even steps taken to actively prevent such connections). Just with huge difference in the density of development within those parcels, obviously.
My sister-in-law lives in a gated condo complex. As you say, they're all over in the suburbs. For vehicles and to a lesser extent mopeds, they kind of function like the superblocks in Barcelona. But, unlike the superblocks, for the most part they don't allow pedestrians to pass through. I wasn't walking around the condo complex enough to really appreciate their strengths and weaknesses.
Compared to North America suburbs, I like the higher density, mixed use on the main streets, and transit access that you find in Chinese suburbs. However, I didn't like that the streets are very big, which will encourage more driving.
@@yizhouwang3645 It's just warning about fire in general, not specific to mopeds: "Hidden fire is more dangerous than visible fire, prevention is better than reaction, duty is as important as Taishan"
wait how can you live in china and watch youtube isnt youtube banned in china?
This was pretty eye-opening. I would've expected things to be more crowded, and I wasn't expecting that amount of cycling infrastructure. Very cool.
The first thing that surprised me in Shanghai (pudong side) was the massive amount of greenery despite the size of the city. Yes, there are only high density buildings and everything is incredibly walking friendly, but there is space between them which they don't simply fill with roads. The density in India and SE Asia is a very different level in my experience.
Even though the planning may be at a provincial level, all cities I've been to are remarkably similar in terms of the dedicated bike lanes and sidewalks for every road. The width of roads is also quite interesting, they're certainly much wider than American and European urban planners are building lately or have ever built. But despite this due to the restricted access they don't quite fall into the stroad category despite the large number of vehicle lanes.
China has gone very hard into wholesale demolition and redevelopment of cities, so most of the big cities are made up of huge scale, master-planned newer development as opposed to the more chaotic, organic development in other Asian countries
Great video! My friend recently biked 3000km across China from Inner Mongolia to Shanghai and had a great experience overall - mostly very respectful drivers in these rural areas compared to the US.
I spent two weeks in China in May, visiting Shanghai, Nanjing and Huangshan to spend time with a friend who was studying there for a year. I was honestly blown away by how good the bike infrastructure was, especially in Nanjing. There were large protected bike lines on nearly every bigger street, most of which were separated by hedges, trees or flowers. Some bike/ moped lanes were so big that they were bigger than the Main Street of my German home town, just on one side. I distinctly remember one time there was a bike lane so wide, that they managed to fit an entire bus stop in it and still had a lot of space for bikes and mopeds to pass. Definitely way better than the bike lanes we got here at home and probably the best I’ve ever felt while biking.
"Chasing chickens isn't a great tourist attraction" -- the cherry on top of an already great video. New subscriber here, haha :)
I dunno if it's your soothing voice or the quality of the infrastructure, but I wasn't stressed for your safety looking at your footage, unlike most North American TH-cam videos. I used shared bikes in Shanghai quite a bit and the critical mass of 2 wheelers always reassures me that motorists are at least aware of their existence.
i was very fortunate to have experience the protected bike lane wonder back in 2011 in Beijing (core city, around ring roads and along hutongs) and in Shanghai in 2012. This brings me back! Thank you for the comparative analysis!
I really like your video and the holistic approach. Biking is not just made better be protectect lanes but the entire urban fabric and driver behavior needs to be improved to reduce distances and improve life.
Please do more videos on China. It will help us to see the shortcomings at home and give interesting ideas on what works and what doesn't.
Thank you, this was extremely interesting! I've been pretty fascinated lately with chinese bike urbanism, one thing that does always strike to me is the apparent lack of road markings for bikes, arguably more useful and effective to those on a bicycle and other types of micro mobility than vertical signage. I think this too depends based on the province you're in? Thanks again for the insights and will watch the next videos.
I grew up in China my first 10 years, I remember because of the high population, lane markings don't mean much, people will squeeze thru whatever openings are available. That probably applies to the bike lanes too.
so basically every Chinese municipality has their own approach to micro-mobility (I'm not using the word bike because E-bikes are becoming as popular if not an absolute majority of micro-mobility devices compared to bikes); Beijing reallocated some of its insanely wide avenues to have protected 3 meter micro-mobility lanes alongside roads; Foshan has green painted micro mobility lanes along roads and painted intersections; Guangzhou uses plastic barriers along roads for micro-mobility and has some intersections, while adding dedicated ramps for bridges for micro-mobility; I've seen Harbin has some examples of Dutch-style protected and painted intersections but at a huge scale; Many "New Districts" have added recreational paved bike lanes to sidewalks; etc... and China changes fast so these approaches are all rapidly evolving and taking lessons from one another
5:51 mixed-use buildings are a central necessity for walkable neighborhoods. With strictly residential zoning street life is dead as there are no destinations for people to go to other than their own home, which is just one building out of many. With shops and small businesses all around a car-free or car-lite lifestyle becomes possible.
At 1:25 I immediately recognize the TV tower from Wuwei. Since all of my family members up until me are from this city, It’s comforting to see the city again on TH-cam while in Canada. I’m a road cyclist myself too, it’s such a treat to see this video. Keep up the good work 👍.
Super interesting video, thanks for making it! I'm excited to see more of China
As someone original from Anhui Province, I really appreciate you taking time to introduce TH-cam how the urban fabric and micro mobility looks like. My hometown has a lot in common with the small city Wuwei showing in your video, and I would say 90% people pick moped/bike to get to places within the urban/suburban area because the conveniece of parking, traffic and strictly enforced traffic laws(you can easily get fines for $40 for 10% speeding or park in undesinated spot). The car ownership in China has actually reached all time high and most family I know have owned at least one car. But people will only choose driving when it's neccessary like raining day, shopping in wholesale stores or going back to rural homes where grandparents lives.
We don't have as impressive public transport because massive availability of biking and sharing bike program(and pretty cheap). This is ok when we mostly move around compact urban area like you can ride mopad to cross town in 30 mins. But what's really missing is the regional transport to connect more remote places. Regional rails are almost non-exist in my place. Don't get me wrong, we have great intercity rail network but not so much to connect nearby city boroughs and counties. Most case you have reply on someone's lift or hours long mopad ride in wide roads next to high speed vehichles unless you own a car.
I lived in Chengdu for a year and the bike infrastructure was so much better than anything I’ve expected in North America. Sure there are also electric mopeds in the bike lanes but it wasn’t a big deal imo. I think China is severely unappreciated by urbanists when it comes to bike infrastructure .
before the 1990s, bicycles were overwhelmingly the most common form of transportation (especially in the big cities); there are old photos of entire streets full of bicycle commuters. Cycling is an integral part of modern Chinese transportation!
Thanks for your valuable sharing. I've lived in a 3rd-tier city in the GD province, southern CN, where I've completed multiple inter-cities tours thru urban/rural roads, as well as frequent local commuting. I'd say the biking situations there is very unpredictable. Often did I find myself in bike lanes with e-scooters coming at me in the opposite direction. Riding on the sidewalk was a common thing with the much absence of bike lanes and the abundance of unkept ones. On the flipped side, it's fairly easy to find supplies/services or a pick-up in worse case scenario. The increase of popularity of cycling as a sport/commuting in recent years also helps. It's not rare to share the road with someone who has the same hobby, be him/her a driver/pedestrian, who would most likely be more considerate than someone who's not a cyclist. It's a pretty light-hearted and awesome experience to have biked in CN.
In my opinion, many new roads (around new suburban development) seem overbuilt with more car lanes than necessary.
Although they usually come with proteced bike lanes, and I like protected cycle lanes as much as any urbanist, I perfer narrow, mixed traffic street in some situation, as they are easier to cross and form a nicer street environment due to lower car speed.
Nice video, so far I only bike in Beijing during layovers and I've been pretty impressed so far by their bike infrastructure even if it's far from perfect. But honestly the most impressive fact for me is how quiet streets are in central Beijing because they banned gas motorcycles and pushed drivers to buy EVs....
EVs unfortunately arent a solution to traffic or pollution, public transit is. A city center with a million EVs is a million times more stressfull to bike and walk in than a city center that bans cars.
@@cooltwittertag Yeah good point, but it's already better than petrol cars and scooters.... Personally I think that electric scooters like they have everywhere in Beijing is pretty awesome and very cost efficient.
those roads and intersections still seem ridiculously oversized tho
Particularly at 6:26. There's no signals telling you if you can proceed or not. I would guess you're supposed to hop onto the pavement (which doesn't seem wide enough for pedestrians and cyclists to share), then wait for the signal to use the pedestrian crossing?
I would bet that even after you wait for that signal, you would still find drivers encroaching on the crossing, because as I understand it right turns on a red light are generally legal in China. This surely all adds up to an experience where you feel like you feel like the whole environment is designed for cars, and could create a perception that bikes are just for losers who can't afford to drive.
Fascinating. I've always been curious about cycling in China since it seemed to have a big cycling boom in the 20th century. It seems unlike North America they're getting transportation right.
Interesting how many EVs
All the mopeds and trikes are also electric. But that's a future video.
Those electric motorcycle trucks are something even more interesting.
very cool to see!
Relating the cities to Canadian ones makes me feel at home.
It seems to me there's little traffic in the big cities. I would expect significantly more mopeds, pedestrians, cars and also significantly more honking.
In my experience, the big cities usually have lots of very broad avenues. So when there's no traffic things are great, but traffic feels much worse than similarly built up areas in many other similar or more developed countries.
It's quite simple. You're looking at streets where the ICEs were removed from almost every scooter, more than half of the cars, and most of the buses.
Could you say anything about how this compares to European cycling leaders like The Netherlands and Denmark? Like in The Netherlands, China seems to mix in pedal cycles with light motorcycles. Does that ever cause conflict, and how is that resolved?
And are cyclists more or less separated from pedestrians? And from cars?
And what are social attitudes to cycling? Is it seen as a form of poverty that people try to escape from, or is it seen as natural that successful people also use bikes for transportation?
This is coming. Driving/biking behaviours in China are much different than what I'm used to in North America and what I've experienced in the Netherlands.
In China, two-wheeled electric vehicles have been managed as bicycles since the first day.
In fact, the first two-wheeled electric vehicles can be pedaled, and the motor only helps.
You don't need any license to drive a two-wheeled electric vehicle.
Whitemud Drive crossing the N. Sask river. Imagine my surprise 😃
A lot of these roads could be improved by just switching the position of car parking a bit. Car parking should never be "protected" by bike lanes, it should always be the other way around. If I get hit by a car door, I'd rather be knocked into the pavement instead of knocked into traffic.
It's also unfortunate to see cycling infrastructure giving up exactly when you need it most, at junctions.
Many bikers in China just ignore the stop line at junctions. They would go forward as possible, usually blocking the path of pedestrians and right-turning cars.
That's why at some junctions cycling infrastructures are intentionally removed: to force them to stop in the right place.
This is so incredibly well designed compared to india. Really drives home that population is an excuse for us to have bad design favoring the growing car market.
The roads look unreasonably wide for that amount of traffic.
There are few bikes to be seen in this video tho. They are mostly mopeds.
And idk why but a lot of the city infrastructure looks very inhospitable to pedestrians and cyclists
They have the best and the worst urban planning out there, fascinating, though. I hope they will take the path towards slowing down, safety and ecology and not cars everywhere!
I almost laughed when you said you didn't feel any stress on the 2 lane outskirt road. Those are the places that accidents happen frequently. Naturally if the road is wide, driver's instinct is to give bikes space since they may swerve. But if two trucks were to cross each other, or overtake, they wouldn't care. The speed limit is 80 kmh, down to 40 in urban area, but that kind of road just begs to be sped on.
It does seem, at least on first impressions based on this short video, that compliance with speed limits is pretty good. Which makes me wonder if there is there average speed tracking or something like that? We know that in North America or Europe that on big roads with multiple lanes and not much traffic, the speed limits would absolutely just be treated as a suggestion.
@liamness Even if the speed limit is complied, roads like that got tons of intersections with even agricultural vehicles, so safe speed should be even lower. And speed cameras can't be installed everywhere, especially on smaller roads like this, doubly so if drivers know the location or have apps that show speed traps.
@@zannierzan9634 Surely it wouldn't be a surprise if speed cameras were every intersection in Chinese cities, it's a surveillance state. You can get automatic fines through WeChat for using your phone at the wheel, or jaywalking (which I don't agree should even be an offence, but whatever), so why not speeding also?
I wonder if cyclists have an opinion about all those mopeds coexisting with cyclist in the bike lanes.
Likely a positive opinion. The vast majority of people in the bike lanes were on mopeds. The mopeds all tended to go at 30 km/h so the speed differential wasn't that big. Also, since I saw very few people on bicycles, the bike lanes might not exist if people on mopeds couldn't use them. Attitudes on space and right of way are also vastly different in China than what I'm used to in North America, but that's a topic for an upcoming video.
long live the revolution , long live Mao Zedong and the Proletariat
which city is this. shanghai?
the more i live in china the more i realise how car dependent and bike unfriendly it is.
I don't think you could ever describe such cities as car dependent, given they have dense walkable neighbourhoods and good transit provision. Car dominated, perhaps.
Too much space is given to cars for sure, but there are still way too many public transit, bike lanes and foot paths to be called car dependent.
Should go to N.Korea you look on satellite imagery they all have beautiful dense walkable multi-class homes! no evil cars about