Comment by pmontra
1 day ago
I've been in China in 2015 and like anywhere else in the world it was very mixed: some urban areas like central NY or central Madrid and Milan (or much shinier) and some rural areas like 200 year ago, but inevitably with electronics.
Basically in every country of the world you can travel one hour from big cities and get in a place deep in the fields or the woods with very different needs and dynamics from the city. They could be different countries and maybe both cities and countryside will be better off if we could have fractally composed states with different laws and regulations.
I don’t know any cities in Americas that is comparable to Shanghai or even Japan in term of transportation or convenient
Americans optimize for hyper-individualistic convenience. The average one-way commute in Dallas, Texas is under 30 minutes. The average in Tokyo is 48-50 minutes. And the guy in Dallas goes to work in a perfectly climate controlled bubble where he doesn’t have to interact with anyone else, while the person in Tokyo is crammed into a rush hour subway car.
I love Tokyo too (never been to Shanghai), because I’m an asian collectivist at heart. But you can’t really compare across cultures when they’re optimizing for different things. Americans are very wealthy and spend a lot of their wealth optimizing to never have to be near other people.
Paris has a metro station everywhere at least in what a tourist can assume to be an enlarged city center. Tokyo is another city with a lot of metro stations. Manhattan too, at least up to Central Park (but 20+ since my last visit.) I don't remember Shanghai to stand out positively or negatively, but 11 years can be a long time.
Didn't China build an entire country-wide bullet train network in that time?
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