Guangzhou, China
Anti-Homeless Spikes to keep them from finding shelter from the rain.China has an oversupply issue in housing construction in general. it is… as if the problem is not merely building too few houses (as some us centric yimby people believe) but rather an unjust system of resource distribution?
For a long time, property was the only allowed wealth that could be inherited. So China became littered with extremely poor construction that was never occupied, and is uninhabitable. There are also restrictions on who can be sold to - in rural areas owners cannot sell to urban buyers or institutions. This means they can’t mortgage their homes.
I’m okay with inheriting property, but you gotta pay for it. The whole passing it down is ludicrous, but I also feel like never owning anything is also not great. Goddamn nuance strikes again unfortunately.
And yet they have millions of what they call “vagrants” how curious.
The constantly connected seem to have a tough time parsing available housing and homelessness. Like, there are 100 homeless and 200 houses, why problem?!
maybe solve a housing crisis instead?
Is this whataboutism?
No because the post is specially about how the Chinese don’t do this, so it’s relevant.
Conveniently, that bus stop also punishes anyone else who makes the mistake of waiting for a bus there.
Ugh, I just want a bench.
The bus also only arrives once every hour (inconsistently)
Can you also make the overpass racist?
Ha, I get it! This is funny because there are no American planners.
American planner here. We don’t actually get to plan shit. We end up being the middlemen between developers and Council. We explain all the rules we didn’t get to make, the developers explain to council how hlthey don’t even want to follow those rules, then Council overrules us and gives the devs whatever they want.
I have seen it in action in city council meetings.
No shortage of American planners. They just work in hedge funds and board rooms
I stand corrected!
So it’s not funny? Oh dear
Lmao no imagine being the guy who designed that
“You want me to draw what ?”
“Torture bus stop. Make spikes that stick into their butts. But, uh… make it look 🌠Geometric🌠, so we can pass it off as an innocent post-modernist design quirk.”
What’s it with these railway based China propaganda posts?
Yes the US sucks.
Yes you can get a lot done in a totalitarian system.
But: China also sucks.
Other democratic countries all manage to have perfectly fine rail systems, it’s not solely the domain of totalitarian governments- just functioning governments.
Much like healthcare, it’s literally just the US government that fucks it up.
For those who want to go the “well Europe/Japan/Korea/China/etc had the advantage of being bombed flat in various wars which made rebuilding for rail easier”, we STILL have plenty of unused, unmaintained rail in the US. We could do this. Hell, you wanna solve unemployment numbers going up? Public works to rehab the right-of-ways that the big companies aren’t using, rehab the rails they ARE using, and suddenly we can AT LEAST enable 100mph trains across the country in less than a decade, and probably bring back passenger rail if we wanted to invest in more rolling stock.
Of course, this means we’d have to lift the steel tariff. And rehab steel mills. And also nationalize good portions of the railway (I’d suggest the entire rail network, and lease usage to the freight companies).
A really sad fact is that rail lines used to connect even the most rural of communities. Many cities removed rail lines to put in roadways.
You can still find rails to a lot of farms in Idaho because that’s how produce used to be shipped.
The big rail companies are a major reason rail sucks in the US. They were given the land for their lines nearly for free with the promise they’d provide public transit. Well, they stopped that. So the US created Amtrak to relieve them of the obligation of public transit with the promise that Amtrak trains would get priority. Well they constantly break that law which makes Amtrak suck with constant delays.
Heck, these companies are at least supposed to be in charge of maintaining the lines, and they don’t do that either. The US has a crazy number of derailments and a big reason for some of them is that the tracks receive little maintenance.
These are still multi billion dollar companies and they do what all giant companies do and nickel/dime everything.
It’s actually worse than that- amtrak was a reagan thing, which was meant to intentionally fail so they could give the passenger rail lines to big freight companies as well.
It was literally meant to fail so they could privatize it, but Amtrak pulled off a miracle. Amtrak is actually really, really good in places they can own their own rail- it’s why they’re really not allowed to build or own their own rail anymore.
Yeah but China’s authoritarian system is how they went from no high speed rail to the most high speed rail in the world in just 25 years. It took Japan 70 years to get where they are now and many European nations more than a hundred.
You mean the places that did the actual research and development on how to effectively build (high speed) trains and rail networks took longer to get where they are than the place that could just use already well-established technology? No way!
Don’t get me wrong, there can absolutely be political barriers to having a good rail network (as evidenced by the US), but let’s not pretend you’re comparing apples to apples here.
Sure, it’s much easier when you can just take all the land and built right over anything in your way.
All Western countries can do this too, they just only do it for motorways to subsidize the fossil fuel and car industries instead of something which would actually be good for people.
Still have to buy it though. Zoom in on any green part of China on Google maps, and chances are that is owned by the state.
Doo the same in England, and you hit a field that has been owned by the same family for 500 years.
Since when are European countries no longer part of the West?
I live in Europe and regularly use rail transport here and love it… But even here we barely maintain what we have, almost never build more, and certainly build far more new roading projects than rail ones.
In Germany for example there were 19km of Autobahn and 56.5km of high speed rail line added in the last five years. Rail is an alternative to large roads. So freeways like the Autobahn network is similar to high speed rail, larger local roads with regional rail and four lane or more roads inside cities are tram or metro lines. However for local roads the alternative is cycling and walking paths and even there you probably want some limited access for things like ambulances, trucks(stores or moving large things), firetrucks and so forth. So everybody is building a lot more roads then rail.
Yes
Then why not use those democracies as examples but post basically the same post within 2 hours about china good?
I tell you why: Propaganda
No, because it makes no difference here.
If I as a European come around and tell Americans how public transport, healthcare, and city planning are just better here, I get to hear the same crap about “propaganda”.
That, or I hear the all too often repeated “BuT thINgs aRe JuSt diFfeRENt HerE!”
Then let’s have examples from those EU countries, instead of an authoritarian state.
I see all these posts, and can’t help but think of the thousands of tankies constantly spamming exhausting propaganda on lemmy. There are so many great examples from democratic countries, so I’m suspicious if someone picks China.
I live in the EU, and currently standing in a bus stop. I’m all for public transport, fuck cars. But fuck China, too.
There’s a stark difference between Chinese propaganda and information about positive things in China.
You can post about good aspects of the Chinese society without mentioning the government, let alone glorifying it. Same goes for the USA. If I post that I like American national parks, does that constitute American propaganda? Are we only allowed to hate on those two countries?
Just because the Chinese model is incompatible with the European or American ones, doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can learn from it.
Actually, yes. Fuck Yellowstone and fuck Yogi the Bear. I’m gonna go ahead and hate everything in the US and everything in China. EU rules, other places drool! Downvote me if and you dare! I’ve got a baguette and I’m not afraid to use it!
I made a baguette in the usa just a few days ago, the secret to a perfect midwest baguette is corn syrup for the outside texture, brominated vegetable oil to better combine with the flour and water, and habaneros for taste.
His name is Yogi Bear, not Yogi the Bear
Nope. Trump says it’s the Gulf of America so…
Yogi is now Yogi THE Bear
Tit for tat
Also, Lays’ chips are now Walkers crisps
We’re taking this thing over!
The Ranger’s not going to like this
Except hostile architecture exists in China, too, so it is actually propaganda…
This is propaganda though. At least the other post of OP today gets all the facts wrong. That is clearly not meant to start a good discussion on the topic.
In Fact, China uses the same kind of hostile architecture:
Cope
People moaning about tankie propaganda are missing the point that it’s not about how amazing China is, it’s about how American politicians are letting their people down.
The “because totalitarianism” argument is a non-starter - plenty of functioning democracies have built effective high speed rail. China is being given as an example because they’re a similar size while having much less money; it’s a counter to the “we’re too big” excuses usually made for why small European and SEA countries are also able to do it.
I feel like you can make the point without felating dictatorships and making the false statement that they don’t do the same shit.
But you don’t understand how big the US is! We can fit two Chinas in Texas! And we can put five Texases in Texas! Omg it’s so huuuuge you guys, public transportation would just not work here, like, ever!!
- some bootlicker, probably
Man up, America! Two hours each way in crushing, soul destroying traffic is PATRIOTIC. What’s good for billionaires is good for the Regular Guy in the job.
I doubt even the chinese can build a train line from scratch in 3h
The train should move the people that distance in 3h, not be planned in 3h
Whoosh
That’s what she (the train) said
How dare you assume the trains gender, they used to be a she
You’re telling me a shrimp fried this rice?
This comment section goes to weird places, man.
Before Trump, America had democracy and no trains
Now it has no trains and no democracy
In America, even if you live in a city with good public transit, there’s frequently no way to get from one city to another. Greyhound routes are extremely limited, Amtrak seems to just loop around major metropolitan cities extremely slowly, and the price of a rental car has gotten out of control after COVID.
So even if you live in a city with strong infrastructure, you still have to buy a car unless you’re willing to be stuck in that city 99.9% of the time.
Sometime in my lifetime, I’d like to see America catch up with the rest of the world.
If we got rid of private property rights it would be a lot easier to build infrastructure.
Just sayin’
Yeah but even in places where a railroad already has right of way for train tracks they can’t get around to doing any upgrades
Yeah china is much more efficient and cuts out the middle man by just killing the homeless and taking their organs.
It sounds like a great train system they have in China. Too bad you’ll be barred from buying tickets if you cross too many pedestrian red lights. This doesn’t make the US better, it just shows it’s not black and white.
Fun fact: Before 2015, you were banned from buying tickets if you are the 2nd child (cuz One Child Policy) and your parents refused to pay the fines. I mean they didn’t even give you a legal identity, didn’t even recognize that you exist.
so confidently incorrect
Sorry that post is costing you social credits
