If there’s one thing that I love to imagine, it’s how much more liveable Los Angeles would be if there was a decent transportation system.
Turns out, the future of LA’s public transportation might be in Shanghai:
In 1990, four years after Los Angeles broke ground on its Red Line subway, Shanghai began to build a subway system too.Los Angeles was one of the richest cities in the world, with an extensive freeway network, top-notch engineers and serious congestion problems. Shanghai was poor, a decaying post-colonial metropolis shaking off decades of economic stagnation. Its streets were congested too — with bicycles.
Most Los Angeles residents know the story of what happened to the Red Line, which was designed to carry passengers from Downtown to the sea but hasn’t quite gotten there. Only recently have planning discussions seriously revived to add a rail line extending farther west.
Shanghai? It is well on its way to building the largest urban rail mass transit system in the world.
You can’t walk very far in a straight line in Shanghai these days without coming across construction of a new subway line or station. Already, Shanghai has opened five subway lines and 95 stations serving 2 million people a day, and as many as six more lines are scheduled to open in the next couple of years. Sometime in the next decade, its subway system probably will surpass the world’s largest and busiest systems, those in New York, Moscow and Tokyo.
