China just approved flying taxis – no pilot needed

Can you tell me more? I visited Shenzhen few months ago and wasn't that astonished. Pretty normal city. Well, I was surprised about few things, like overall lack of traffic jams in the 17-million city, roads seems to be well planned, but I could just be lucky. And that's me coming from Kazakhstan, which is not exactly first-world country. Life seems kind of the same, taxi apps, map with reviews, delivery guys, etc.

Actually I'd argue that Chinese IT is slightly behind Kazakhstan, because their localization is so bad. Baidu maps does not provide English translation at all, and that seems the only proper maps for China. Most WeChat apps I tried also were Chinese-only. I'm pretty sure that every major website and application is well translated to English in my country, Chinese people seems to care very little about English, which makes it particularly hard for international visitors. I literally had to screenshot some app over and over, pasting it to Google Translate to be able to register in the some metro app, so I could actually buy tickets with app and not cash.

Also motorcycle people were absolutely crazy about road rules, like they don't care at all about anything. Auto road, pedestrian road, red light, opposite direction, anything works for them. I was seriously concerned about someone hitting me, which didn't happen, but few times it was close. Car people, on the opposite, were pretty disciplined. May be cameras don't work for motorcycles?

For me, I guess it was the experience with the public transport, the cleanliness of the city, the way everything was built to interact with your phone seamlessly and automatically once you have the local apps(at the cost of privacy, I am fully aware), and the dazzling look of it all. Everything is new and shiny and feel safe. And not just the sterile kind of clean, but one that has a vibrant life under it.

Yes, the english localization is trash. But I mean, I am in China, I am happy enough they even have some english available. I speak some other Asian languages and not sure if it was obvious, but the US also have trash translation to those languages here too.

Maybe that was the biggest difference. I can read a bit of chinese so my experience was more "the way it was meant to be" I guess? I assume it can disappoint if you expect just an upscaled Western experience there. China is big enough they don't need to cater to rich foreigners. I knew the feeling well enough when I first came to the US so I am not surprised. But maybe it is a novel experience to Westerners.

The problem is the many cities in the West are objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world, so many people who don't have that global perspective come to China and think "it's so futuristic" or so, when in reality it's something that has been achieved elsewhere decades ago and China is just one in the line of a common trend. Even when others in this thread say cities like Singapore or Hong Kong are "futuristic", Singapore has been like that since the late 90s, that's not futuristic, it's rather the norm since the 2000s. Certainly those from Asia, even Southeast Asia aren't finding those cities paticularly revolutionary, if not a bit shinier.

Some Chinese Cities may try to "integrate" tech more like in Shenzhen with drone delivery, flying taxis here, or qr-code scanning or whatnot, but that's just more of gimmicks for a select few rather than fundamental lifestyle changes. Far as I would say, Tokyo is still likely the most "developed" of cities in terms of quality of life.

>The problem is the many cities in the West are objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world.

If anything that's more of an American problem rather than a Western one. There's plenty nice cities in Europe.

Singapore will always be Disneyland with the Death Penalty (early 90s) in my book. But seriously, china built outs its cities much later than the west, and they have a cyberpunk feel. But it feels like a lot of gimmicks, even Japan feels like that (they build things like Tokyo's Skytree, but it isn't very practical, and they just repeat this all over the country). If you live in a city, the basics matter, like...nice public transit, which china has built out very nicely in the last two decades.

"The West"?

Do you mean North America? Because cities in Europe and Oceania are wildly different from the cities in North America and definitely not 'objectively terrible compared to cities elsewhere in the world' (which includes cities in Africa, which honestly aren't amazing).

I think you used the wrong map app. Everyone in China use gaode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoNavi. This is the best map app I ever seen.

I have not been to either for 20+ years, but Singapore or Hong Kong did not feel futuristic to me. Singapore is certainly efficiently run and clean, but at the time I definitely would have preferred living in London (or multiple smaller British cities), or Paris, or Sydney (culturally, if not geographically, western)

> the way everything was built to interact with your phone seamlessly and automatically once you have the local apps

This sounds so horrifying to me.

Tokyo feels more retro futuristic than modern futuristic. Aside from the Shinkansen, a lot of the tech and software you interact with there feels antiquated and even borderline terrible. Meanwhile in SF there are self driving cars everywhere, tech company billboards everywhere, apps with great UX, etc.

Believe me or not, I've read plenty of info in the Internet and I don't think I've found this app. Weird! Thanks for information, it looks like a missing piece. Hopefully my future trips will be more fun. I've used Google Maps and Apple Maps, but both were bad.