The most recent chart of the day from the Economist highlights how frustrated Chinese are with their daily commute: of 11,000 people in 13 countries surveyed in a recent poll, the Chinese come out on top in terms of average length of commute and how frustrated they feel with their commute. Chinese commuters spend an average of more than 40 minutes getting to work (compared to a little over 20 minutes on average in the US), and almost a third of the people surveyed in China have considered leaving their jobs because of frustrations over their commute.
Transportation is a recurrent topic in my classes, and it’s one of the topics on which it’s the most clear that my students and I have vastly different opinions. I personally believe that Wuhan should deal with its traffic problem by putting in more buses, raising the tax on cars and gas to get them off the roads, and make it easier for people to get around by bike. My students, in general, think the city should build more roads. When we discussed this topic last week, it turned out that not a single one of my students own a bike — even though they live on university campuses, which should be the best candidates for bike-friendly locations. Instead, people buy a moped as soon as they can afford one, and then a car once they can afford that — and until then, they make do with buses. We do all agree that the subway (which is scheduled to be completed in a few years) will help, but given how much the city will have grown by the time it’s finished, it will probably just help the city to deal with rising pressure on the transportation system, rather than relieve the pressure that’s already there.
Even if the Wuhan city government did want to put in place policies to move people over to bikes and buses, it must be difficult to push that through when there seems to be such overwhelming public support for car-friendly policies. I’ll have to work harder to convince my students that more roads will make their commute worse, not better…
Any idea of the total coverage of those free bike stations? Are they actually used?
I’ve seen one person riding one of the free bikes, but that’s it — even if it did catch on, it doesn’t seem like it would make much of a dent in traffic. Maybe it’s meant to signal that bikes are cool? At this point there are so many cars on the roads that riding a bike doesn’t seem very safe.