# Shanghai Subway Construction



## WhoozOn1st (Aug 25, 2007)

Pretty interesting article here:

Shanghai Subway - L.A. Times

For bus fans out there (both of you), at the bottom of the page is a link to a story about a new model of articulated bus to be tested in L.A. The new type is so long it's technically illegal and needs an exemption from Caltrans.


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## WhoozOn1st (Aug 26, 2007)

I just saw that the Shanghai story has changed at the L.A. Times website. There is no longer the link to the story about articulated buses, and the second page of the main article is requiring log-in, a la Cleveland Plain Dealer. I apologize to people who couldn't see the whole article(s) because of these changes.

The L.A. Times is owned by the Chicago Tribune. There have been excruciating cost-cutting changes recently, and I swear sometimes that the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, including dealing with the website. What used to be a world-class newspaper is quickly being reduced to an ad rag.


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## Guest (Aug 27, 2007)

I was able to get to the second page without a log-in. I though that the LA times usually required a log in to see anything, which I won't do. I regard it as the equivalent of requiring identification to look at newspapers headlines on the street box. To ask for such and then pontificate about privacy is absolutely hypocricy.

I've been there. If you wanted to find a more or less equivalent US city, or at least west coast version, it would be San francisco. New York would probably be a better example, but still not that close. Shanghai is somewhat constrained on land. It is very densely populated. Traffic on the surface varies from slow to very slow to completely congealed.

The subway is jampacked all day, because it is by far the fastest way to travel. By Chinese standards, Shanghai is not poor. To the contrary, it is the richest city in China. I

think that Shanghai is also one of the "Special Economic Zones" that the general population of the country is not even allowed to enter unless they have a stamp in their internal passport allowing them to do so. That I have seen in action, when some 10 years ago on a train from Beijing to Shenzhen the police came through and checked the passports of all their citizens about 2 stops before getting to Shenzhen. Foreignors were not checked.

Pre WW2, Shanghai was a British-run enclave and also very prosperous then, in fact a rival to Hong Kong. There are in some areas a lot of buildings left from that era that are in the process of being refurbished and returned to their former glory.

You must also remember that China is still a dictatorship and no one is going to criticize the actions of the government in an international publication, and very little in any other circumstance. The comments about no public hearings and move what ever is in the way are right on. In the same train ride part of it was on a new line open less than one year. There were places where we could see the ends of graves sitcking out of the cut slope. Cemetary in the way? No problem. Just cut through it. Try getting away with that in the US, or almost any other civilized country for that matter.

George


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## WhoozOn1st (Aug 28, 2007)

George, good that you could see the whole article, and thank you for the insight.


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