September 21, 2010
Two Cities in One
Posted by Evan Osnos
Something strange is happening in Beijing: The city is freezing up.
The Chinese capital has always functioned in a register of productive and tolerable clamor: busy, frenetic, and congested, yes, but manageable and irresistibly interesting. Cabbing across town at rush hour usually required reading material heftier than a periodical but lighter than Proust.
But over the summer and into the fall, something deep in the municipal DNA has gone berserk and is replicating fast enough to turn the city into “a giant, nightmarish, gridlocked parking lot,” as The Wall Street Journal’s Shai Oster put it last month. First, there was the bizarre, metaphor-friendly ten-day traffic jam on a sixty mile stretch of highway outside of the city—sparked, it seemed, by a flurry of coal deliveries to factories—but now we are looking at something less like a freak event and more like a devolution of the species. As Oster points out this week, the congestion seems to have passed some imperceptible Rubicon and become, more or less, unworkable. These photos, circulating around the Chinese Web, show people walking beside their cars. It doesn’t have quite the drama of the usual abandoned-cars-with-doors-open sci-fi set piece, but it’s getting there.
Part of the problem is that the city’s usual car-use restrictions are being lifted over the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays. But, far more relevant, is the fact that the population has hit nearly twenty million—a decade ahead of projections—fueled by a constant influx of migrants in search of opportunity. And who could blame them?
But with Beijingers driving off the lots with new cars nearly two thousand times a day—and coming to a halt a few feet away, one assumes—this is the right moment to point out that electric bikes just might be one signpost to salvation. I’ve been riding the Turtle King more than ever this fall and have come to see Beijing as two cities in one: a paralyzed, Hobbesian mess in the center of the road, and a fleet, functioning, open-air society on the edges. Take your pick.
Keith Gessen wrote about Moscow’s epic gridlock in “Stuck,” in the August 2nd issue of the magazine.
The Chinese capital has always functioned in a register of productive and tolerable clamor: busy, frenetic, and congested, yes, but manageable and irresistibly interesting. Cabbing across town at rush hour usually required reading material heftier than a periodical but lighter than Proust.
But over the summer and into the fall, something deep in the municipal DNA has gone berserk and is replicating fast enough to turn the city into “a giant, nightmarish, gridlocked parking lot,” as The Wall Street Journal’s Shai Oster put it last month. First, there was the bizarre, metaphor-friendly ten-day traffic jam on a sixty mile stretch of highway outside of the city—sparked, it seemed, by a flurry of coal deliveries to factories—but now we are looking at something less like a freak event and more like a devolution of the species. As Oster points out this week, the congestion seems to have passed some imperceptible Rubicon and become, more or less, unworkable. These photos, circulating around the Chinese Web, show people walking beside their cars. It doesn’t have quite the drama of the usual abandoned-cars-with-doors-open sci-fi set piece, but it’s getting there.
Part of the problem is that the city’s usual car-use restrictions are being lifted over the Mid-Autumn and National Day holidays. But, far more relevant, is the fact that the population has hit nearly twenty million—a decade ahead of projections—fueled by a constant influx of migrants in search of opportunity. And who could blame them?
But with Beijingers driving off the lots with new cars nearly two thousand times a day—and coming to a halt a few feet away, one assumes—this is the right moment to point out that electric bikes just might be one signpost to salvation. I’ve been riding the Turtle King more than ever this fall and have come to see Beijing as two cities in one: a paralyzed, Hobbesian mess in the center of the road, and a fleet, functioning, open-air society on the edges. Take your pick.
Keith Gessen wrote about Moscow’s epic gridlock in “Stuck,” in the August 2nd issue of the magazine.
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