Habibi, come to the UAE or Qatar
I guess I see the unfinished projects as being the proof: The World and the 2nd Palm haven’t been finished because they (I assume) stopped making commercial sense to the developers.
I would finally note that Dubai specifically has little oil and gas wealth. Maybe 1% directly and 10% that comes as subsidy from AD which has plenty. The rest is literally just a combination of smart and commercially savvy governance combined with an essentially unlimited amount of desert to build in.
Once I had an issue with bus routes for my father's employees (similar problem, high density route with fewer routes). I put a request on their dashboard from abroad and within days, their reply came back with them confirming a trio of new buses to cater to that route.
Another time, I had an idea for bus route planning (not related to above, that relied on a simple ping system for bus driver notification). I sent an email describing the idea in short to the Emirati CEO of the bus authority, and within 15 minutes, he acknowledged my email and connected me with his advisor to set up a meeting the next day. The advisor (an Indian with a US PhD in urban transport systems) discussed my idea through over a meeting.
Oh, and there are self-driving bus demos currently happening in Abu Dhabi right now.
sorry to disappoint you but Shanghai is the place where ride-sharing wasn't even allowed in its main international airport just 12 months ago. bureaucracy mixed with corruption is at shockingly bad level.
Good overview of the system: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Kn2tL51bBs&t=8s
Lots of real (and not paper) economic growth.
But spot on about the mentality. A lot of that great infrastructure here was inherited, and the attitude around it's continued development has been super conservative. Not to mention the Berlin government is borderline insolvent.
Just look at the cluster fuck that was car free Friedrichstr.
Warsaw is great, need to visit Poland again, have a huge soft spot for pączki.
https://culture.pl/en/article/fat-thursday-polands-tastiest-...
These concepts have been popping up in the last few years all over the world.
The Shanghai example is special because it uses actual busses, and actual stops.
Now, demand calculation in the west is easy: Students always go from where they live to the school they are being schooled at in the morning, and return either at around 1pm or around 4pm. You don't need a fancy system to put those lines on the map: check when school ends, add 15 minutes, then have busses drive to major population centres (with smaller villages being served similarly when the bus arrives).
The elderly want to go to and from doctors, and to supermarkets. That, too, is easily manageable in the 'students at school' ofttime and follows similar patterns.
Workers are similar, especially for large workplaces. Smaller workplaces - now it gets interesting, especially when there is some movement between workers and places of business (and, as a third aspect, time).
In Shanghai, that only is possible because you have a large overlap between
1. people who ride public transit and 2. are tech-savvy enough to use the demand-calculating system. Also 3. as you are essentially making schedules to plan around obsolete, you need to provide enough service that people aren't surprise-lost in the city because the route changed randomly.
Where I live, public transit is used by students and the elderly (who don't do 'internet things' and pay for their ticket in cash, with the driver. The essential young-adult to middle-aged population doesn't use public transit, because it is too slow, too expensive, and too inflexible for their work schedules. Good luck getting the critical mass of data to design bus routes there.
Well, that's what happens if you can just throw money at problems. In Germany, it would most likely get rejected because there are no spare buses/drivers or budget for the fuel, and even if there was money it would likely be delayed for at least one year because the new route would have to pass through the usual tender/bid system first.
https://www.ncesc.com/which-european-countries-dont-have-ube...
So Shanghai seems indeed low-bureaucracy, in comparison.
Try visiting Switzerland, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway and so on.
When rural trains in China run as well as Swiss trains, come back to me.
And in terms of overall development strategy, its very often very Americanized. Big highways, big highway interchanges. Dubai is known for basically building everything along a very big highway. There is no reason for a country this small to ever have a highway this large.
Given how trivially easy they are geographically their modal share in public transport is not very high at all.
Re-planning your network once a year is plenty.
Does feel like the Singaporean economic miracle is under a lot of pressure. Demographics and retirement savings I guess being a big part of it.
Huh? Chinese government is insanely bureaucratic.
It’s true that if there’s something the govt wants they enlist the entire bureaucracy in favor of that and make it happen rapidly, but just because the bureaucracy can be functional, and even effective, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
I mean, that’s basically the definition of a bureaucracy, which while some may treat the word as synonymous for inefficient or incapable, it really isn’t, and the Chinese bureaucracy is proof of that.
Or, if you want to go small, my school district changed bus routes with a 48 hour turn around time when we moved to our home in the country, and again when our teenager's schedule changed and he could no longer drive the younger sibling home.
And slaves.
Lots and lots of modern day slaves.
changing routes is needed of course. Cities chanre and you need to follow that. They don't change fast though. long term routes also drive change as people adqust their life to what they can do.
Even in Lisbon, it seemed that public transit was a much bigger hassle, both in time and cost, than a ride-sharing app.
We had a family of 4. Fares are about €3-4 each so €12 per ride in one direction. Ride-shares were about €9. We also abused the intro ride-share offers by creating separate accounts and got that down to €4.50.
Adding more service is a good thing, but it needs to be done in a sustainable way so that people can rely on it long term.
Sometimes cities will make massive changes to their network. By eliminating bad routes they can often find the money to fund good routes. This is a very different situation.
I live in a city in a Western European country which adds multiple new bus routes a year, and always has done. Honestly I'd assume this is the case for any medium to large city.
The unusual bit about the Shanghai initiative is that, presumably, they have significant _spare_ capacity, to be used for low-volume/experimental stuff like this. Spare capacity is a slightly weird thing for a bus network to have; they tend to run basically on the edge.
Dublin Bus has added massive amounts of service over the last decade, going from an incredibly deficient bus service to merely a bad bus service, and has in the course of this been able to significantly lower journey prices, due to increased usage.
> It takes years for people to adjust their lives around better service
I think this possibly _used_ to be the case, but the likes of Google Maps have changed that. You'll see bus routes introduced days ago with full buses, because people want to get to a place, they ask Google Maps, and it tells them. 30 years ago, people would take the bus routes they were used to, but today they will take the bus route their phone tells them to take, so introducing new services has become a lot easier.
(This does sometimes have unintended consequences, when routes intended as low-volume feeders get identified by the apps as a shortcut and swamped.)
Indeed. It takes a pretty big bureaucracy to be able to ban the wikipedia. Oh, and ban gmail & all of google. And all news sites in general. Can customize your bus schedule though I guess.
I only use ride sharing for longer 30+ minute trips, and usually that is between 10 and 15 euros one direction.
Great if you can pull that off in your city, but I'm not confident you can. For that matter if you can pull it off it means you are lacking smaller investments many years before that would have resulted in some transport that you could have grown over time to what you are finally getting.
For instance in the UK (in 2022), a whopping 6% of commuting trips were by bus and 9% were by rail. Even less for leisure: 3% of leisure trips are by bus, 3% by rail. That's terrible market share!
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-statistic...
Most of what is lacking is the money needed to run that service. That is not an innovation.
This is simply not true. Madison, WI just finished a massive revamp of their entire bus system where many existing routes were re-aligned or replaced with rapid transit routes with dedicated lanes. Despite massive amounts of naysaying from local conservatives the project has been a massive success and has resulted in a huge bump in ridership [1].
The whole thing happened because the city elected a mayor [2] who was laser focused on making transit happen and just kept working on it.
I think US politics has a major incentive alignment problem - if your local politician's genuine personal success metric is "improved transit" then you're likely to end up with improved transit. If success is "got re-elected", "got more corporate donations" or "used mayorship as a stepping stone to national politics" then you're likely to end up with a milquetoast compromiser who never does anything of substance because they don't want to be accountable for anything.
[1] https://www.channel3000.com/news/madison-metro-sees-brt-wind...
It all comes down to corruption. In the west we are accustomed to thinking we are much less corrupt, but that is proving not to be less and less true every day.
Corruption is loyalty to a man over a mission. All systems that have good outcomes are when the man that people are loyal to (because he can punish dissent and reward loyalty, such as with wages) chooses a mission over their own self interest and enforce subordination to a mission over themselves.
China is a country that is capable of punishing their richest citizens, while the US and most of the west are not. China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula. Here in the US, our "law" let the Sackler Family promote addiction and then gave them a slap on the wrist while letting them use the "law" to reduce/avoid consequences.
China has more Rule of Law than the US right now.
Rule of law was thought to be a system where all citizens, including the rich, are protected from the government by due process, but rule of law is when the rich and powerful have limits on their arbitrary executions of power. Law exists to protect the weak from the powerful, law exists to bind power. In the west the rich have co-opted law as their tool.
> crippled by rules of their own making.
No, not our own making. The making of our richest. The rules in the west exist to solidify and cement the power of our richest and they use their money to pay for power consolidation giving them increasingly more power to compromise our laws for their interest.
China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
> lack of bureaucracy
Who do you think is doing these things? Literally their bureaucracy. It requires people to organize and do those things. Bridges and tunnels don't get built without planning, funding, and execution, which is exactly what bureaucracies do.
The rich people in the west have been so effective at compromising institutions of power that "bureaucracy" is synonymous with "inefficiency." Their bureaucrats are trusted with the power to make things happen, while our elected officials bind their behavior and set them up for failure in order to justify privatizing their functions.
Not quite. You either don't realize or are overlooking how much implementation of the law in China, at every level, depends very much on who is doing the implementation. But the US under Trump is quickly heading down the road to where I can see it being worse than China in that respect.
> China can do things because their power is working on behalf of their people, while in the west our power is working on behalf of the powerful.
I can't disagree with your criticism of the West, but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
> China executed the executives that poisoned infant formula.
That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017. Bo Xilai is a prime example.
But back to the original topic of public transportation: That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
and? the Chinese people live and believe it. propaganda can be true, and governments can in fact live up to their statements. ofc with westerners' pathological mistrust of authority, as well as their penchant to pick the worst possible leaders, we will never come to any agreement about this.
also, are we seriously still unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age? social capital is hardly something to be exoticized. keep the orientalist rhetoric where it belongs please.
Is that is not true here? What you stated is true of all hierarchical systems. The criminalization of "driving while black" in practice is an example of who is doing the implementation effecting law in America, and that is just one example out of many. The current head of the OMB said he wants to put government workers in trauma so that they do not have the resources to regulate big oil, on video.
> worse than China in that respect.
We are already there.
> but your statement about China is straight from a CCP propaganda handbook.
It is my external assessment from my own observations including significant amounts of talking with Chinese citizens. If you think I am a CPC propagandist, you can check my comment history where I assert that Taiwan is its own country many many times, and I am quite critical of many things, but if you want to have reality based assessments, it's clear that China can build things while the west generally cannot and it's clear China was right about the GFW (which implies a whole bunch of things Americans generally aren't ready to confront), even if what is said about the GFW is almost word for word the same out of Chinese people's mouths and very clearly propaganda.
> That was a long time ago, and obviously those executives didn't have the necessary guanxi.
I can't argue with that assessment, but it is also tautologically true based on how you define gunaxi. Regardless, there were consequences, while there are a dearth of any consequences for anything of our rich class in the US. We even refer to this immunity to prosecution as "the corporate veil," which appears to be nearly impenetrable in the US. The only time it seems to be penetrable is when another person of the same class is damaged.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power
My core point is that we can't seem to find anyone guilty here. There are no consequences for the rich in the west. In the US the law is used as a weapon to create order while maintaining power hierarchies and not a system of using the states power against the powerful to promote justice. When Hong Kong was re-colonized by the Chinese, it was rule Rule of Law and the rights associated with it that became the academic argument for why those in Hong Kong are justified to protest extradition, and while at the time I found those arguments quite compelling. The degradation of the west and clear decline of democracy has turned the issue from what was clearly black and white at the time, to something that is much more grey.
If I ask which country has more corruption, I don't think the answer is very clear anymore, and if law is supposed to address corruption particularly at the highest levels, then it seems clear our notion of law is weak.
You mention CPC propaganda, but what about our own propaganda? If you analyze while assuming our own propaganda is true, western ideas make a lot of sense, but if you analyze ground reality, reality seems to be conflicting strongly with our propaganda.
> Who gets accused and is found guilty of corruption in China depends very much on who is in power. That much was obvious in how Xi cleared out the opposition from 2013-2017.
And yet my understanding is most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting. China is now a technological power house, and their innovation engine is now very much competitive, if not exceeding, our own.
What if those people cleared out actually were corrupt? What if they were like republicans who argue that the government can't work, and that's why they should be in power/their crony friends should get all the contracts? What if those people are doing as much damage to society as possible in order to justify new leadership? That's what's happening in the US and has been happening for 50 years.
So what looks like a black and white power grab, once you put those ideas in American terms, is much much less black and white.
> That's one thing China gets right that the US is totally inept at because it's built on a car culture.
These topics are related. Car culture is a function of the car industry's capture of the US government. China, AFAIK, wants to imitate car culture in order to not appear poor, but whether car company concerns or national concerns come first and how that gets navigated is materially meaningful to public transportation. Public transportation means less car owners, less car infrastructure, etc. It is unchecked power in the US that prevents our own infrastructure investments, because making those investments means challenging those who currently enjoy nearly unchecked power.
some of them do; the well educated ones don't.
> propaganda can be true
except that it's not
I lived in China for years and am pretty well versed in life there under Xi and how the "rule of law" actually works there.
> unironically typing "guanxi" in this day and age
I left China in 2017 so it's _possible_ that things have dramatically changed since then, but from all accounts it hasn't. So it's not ironic because everything still runs on guanxi rather than on the rule of law.
- yes, particularly under Trump the rule of law is being eroded; no question there. And there is systemic bias in the system here (i.e, driving while black, etc.) But it's not comparable with how the "rule of law" (which really should be called "rule by law") works in China. I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
> most Chinese (greatly influenced by the perceptions of those I interact with) believe that there was a successful crackdown on rampant corruption coinciding with a cross society economic uplifting.
Maybe the thinking has changed since I was there (left in 2017) but I can tell you without a doubt that the well educated class was not fooled by Xi's crackdown (which started a couple of years after he came into power). There's corruption everywhere--who got cracked down on (who certainly were corrupt) depended entirely on whose side they were own (much like Trump today). At the lower level, who gets the ax depends on the relationships they have with higher ups. Yes, in the US this happens to, but it's not at all the same level (until Trump--which is what's frightening about Trump).
Yes, the cross-society economic lift was real and greatly to China's credit. But that was not a result of some crackdown on corruption but rather a liberalization of the economy under Deng and continued by others especially Hu Jintao. I was there when Xi came into power and we all thought he was going to continue that, and instead after a couple of years it become clear he was going the opposite direction. That's when those who had the money and ability to leave started doing so, or putting together plan B's.
There is a faustian bargain whereby the middle class will support the government so long as there is economic growth (which is why the illusion of economic growth must be maintained). This is couple with extreme information controls and immediate crackdowns on any dissent, so that there is no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa", as the Chinese would say.
The idea being that there is a gunaxi correlated "budget for corruption," but use of that budget comes with strings, and if corruption is engaged in, you are effectively signing a contract for results and that results forgives the corruption.
The mandarin first speaker who first said the idea didn't explain it exactly like that, but believed it completely and without question. The Cantonese first speaker who explained it more rigorously believed it in practice, but also that the corruption budget was far exceeding what was "planned" for creating crisis. Both asserted their own superiority to India, which also has a culture of corruption without a culture that demands results. Neither of them knew eachother.
Certainly when I heard that, my American ideological immune system was like "uh hu, that's certainly an interesting perspective." I was reminded of stories about how stringent military quartermasters are because it's understood that corruption is viral.
But it's hard to argue that China does not have results, long term thinking (kinda), and it appears to act on behalf of the public more.
Around the time of Hong Kong, I was fully on board with "Kantian universalize-able ideals restricting the actions of societies most rich and powerful" being a good definition for Rule of law, but since Trump round 2 in particular, I've come to analyze rule of law not by what it is, but what its outputs are supposed to be with the underlying assumption that any system that produces results must in some ways have structure that reflect Rule of Law.
Rule of law is when people, particularly leaders, subordinate to an idea/reality/reason rather than to a hierarchical structure/arbitrariness, so even if there is corruption consequences for failure and reward for success is rule of law-ish. I think that's even more visible when compared to the western standard of reward for failure and reward for success, more commonly stated as "rugged capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich" or "privatize profits and socialize risks."
> I know, I lived it for a number of years, owned a business there, was deeply immersed in the goings on, and many frank discussions with our circle of well educated Chinese (many of whom were emigrating or at least getting their kids out of the country).
How predictable/arbitrary would you say the operating environment was?
Predictability suggests rule of law, while arbitrariness strongly suggests none. I'm not sure I would buy IP related examples as related to rule of law, and I would also likely try to distinguish between a hyper competitive environment between unequally resourced people and arbitrary executions of power, which I don't quite think are the same.
> faustian bargain
Timothy Snyder is my favorite political thinker, he recently wrote "On Freedom" and talks about "freedom from" vs "freedom to" at length. Money in many ways is freedom. If you don't have money you are not very free. So China getting richer, while in America Wages are stagnant and losing buying power year over year has implications for overall freedom. In many ways China is becoming more free and America less free if you think about "freedom to" and "freedom from" holistically rather than just "freedom from" which is a very American way of thinking about freedom. Chinese policy becomes a lot more defensible in terms of "freedom to" while it is completely indefensible in terms of "freedom from."
Where once I saw authoritarianism in China, now I ask how much of their behavior is actually an answer to the Paradox of Intolerance and how true the argument of the greater needs for ensuring order in a society at that scale (which from what I can tell is definitely propaganda used to sell it internally). Don't get me wrong, I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I'm interested in your analysis of China from a "freedom to" perspective.
> no opportunity to mount any resistance, and therefore "mei banfa"
Timothy Snyder calls this "the politics of eternity."
> middle class will support the government
Given what you've said so far, what does it mean for the middle class to not support the government? Consent is the core primitive of western political ideology and foundational idea of 'rule of law,' so the implication of withdrawing consent is certainly interesting.
I don't believe in 'side-ism'. A crackdown on the GOP would be a benefit for the rule of law while it still being in a perilous position, while a crackdown on the DNC is very a much a prelude to destroy the idea of rule of law altogether.
Destroying the opposition isn't obviously bad. Referencing side-ism implies that removing all the nazis from your government is a bad thing because it gives non-nazis unchecked anti-nazi political power. I view that as a good thing if the definition of nazi reflects reality (like in germany) rather than unreality (like russia/urkaine).
It's bad. It's what turns a democracy into a dictatorship. And it's always for "good reasons" (by labeling the opposition as Nazi's/corrupt/criminals/etc.).
Now China was never a democracy, but the CCP was not monolithic and was somewhat democratic within the party itself -- except that is now gone.
There's no legal process, so the only option would be mass protests. Believe it or not, this does happen in China occasionally, but not in big cities like Beijing/Shanghai, and it's very quickly put down and not reported in the news (and social media reports are very quickly censored, though Chinese can find ways around this, often using very clever play-on-word techniques which the Chinese language is much better suited to than English; censors are on to it though so it's cat-and-mouse or whak-a-mole).
> I completely see china as an authoritarian state rife with unchecked (and therefore arbitrary) power, but China is also functional in a way the US is very much not and that's become very interesting to think about, for me.
I understand how that can seem appealing from a distance. Much like the way that people who don't live in the US look at it from a distance and think "land of opportunity" (which to be fair, for some people it has been). Live and work in China for years and you understand that the way it looks from the outside is not the way it is. China is no more functional than the US, and in fact, very much less so. The uncertainty created by the lack of a proper legal system is _not_ something you experience in the US. Case in point: We were pulled in by the police for failure to comply with some paperwork (paperwork that couldn't be complied with, a typical catch-22 situation in China that creates a grey zone in which businesses operate within the law but can at any moment also be considered in violation of the law if so deemed). Anything could have happened, from shutting us down completely, to a slap on the wrist. We were first told we had to shut down completely, but the higher up got a call from one of our well-connected Chinese friends and gave us a slap on the wrist instead (see how that works?). Except that the highest investigating officer said that he wanted to be a partner in our business and we ended up giving him 10% of the business to ensure that we didn't get pulled in again. Straight out of Don Corleone's playbook. This is quite common, and none of our Chinese friends were surprised (in fact, they advised us to go along with it, because it's just the way it goes (unless you have enough guanxi). For all its faults, this would not happen in the US (we'd sue).
This is just one example. But articles and books about China don't give you a proper idea of what things are like there because people visit for 3 months (or 3 weeks) and think they understand China. Or they spend 1-2 years there at a Chinese university, or living in an expat bubble, and think they know. Spend 6 years there embedded in Chinese society, and you'll quickly become disabused of your ideas about China.
I also pretty strongly disagree with your take on freedom. It's easy to say that because you don't live in an autocratic country, and neither has Snyder. I've spent years in two highly autocratic countries (China and Russia) and let me tell you, money itself is not freedom. What money does in those countries is buy you a ticket out.
After having lived on almost every continent in a range of countries under different governmental systems, I still agree with Churchill that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
Sometimes the label matches. There have been 4 people in high GOP positions who have sieg heiled. They aren't being labeled Nazis, they are objectively and factually Nazis. Germany's crackdown on the AFD is a response to power seizures/white supremacy in America. The GOP strategy writers literally wrote "there will be a revolution and it will be bloodless if the left allows it to be." There has very much been a declaration of "us or them", and that's not the type of thing that can be tolerated. You can't say "yes we'll work together with people who have said it's us or them."
Likewise your argument becomes a defense for pervasive systemic corruption, because the defense is no longer "we aren't corrupt," but "they're attacking us because we're the opposition, this is a power grab."
The gridlock that is a direct result of lack of corruption enforcement "because that would be a political power grab" became the mandate to overthrow the old establishment/ignore the constitution. What is happening in America right now is most influenced of all people by Merrick Garland who failed to prosecute a criminal because he was worried about enforcing the law against politicians which turns the justice system into a political weapon.
Unfortunately a weapon is just a weapon, it is a completely amoral object that amplifies the morality of it's wielder. Police officers carry weapons. It is not the weapon or that a weapon was used, but what the weapon is used to achieve that is worth analyzing.
That's the problem with side-ism, it implies that there are two equal sides with equal legitimacy and equal ability with equal strategies.
Game theory is deeply relevant, because on the two ends of the political spectrum are the cooperators (liberals) and people who think they should defect if they are able to win by doing so (conservatives). Conservatives don't cooperate when they should, and liberals don't defect when they should, and that's how those ideologies largely fail. Conservatives end up power grabbing (which is what I believe you're largely speaking in reference to) and creating dictatorship, while liberals fail to power grab and create dictatorship by ceding power.