Subway Series: NYC vs. Shanghai

by Matt

Many of Val’s blog entries contrast the US and China with an emphasis on how strange this place is.  However, I want to highlight that despite all of this strangeness, China can also be awe-inspiring.

Take the subway system, for example.

Living in New York City for the past several years, we heard a lot about the 2nd Avenue subway line.  It’s been in the works for over 75 years, jokingly referred to as "The Line That Time Forgot.”  With powerful labor unions, pesky shop owners, and conflicted Upper East Side residents, the project has faced a series of false starts and plenty of dysfunction.  Phase I of the project, which runs a measly two miles up the east side from 62nd St to 96th St, still has yet to open.

Contrast all of this with the subway system in Shanghai, a city with three times the population of NYC. Imminent domain, labor groups, and environmental concerns be damned, this city – and country, for that matter – gets stuff done!  The city is adding entire subway lines (not just two mile sections) at a pace of one line per year.

Here’s a subway map from 2000, when the city had just a few lines.

Here’s a map from 2010, after a decade of expansion aided by the World Expo.

And here’s the planned map for 2020.

  

Unlike the infamously incomplete 2nd Avenue subway in NYC, I have no doubt that this aggressive expansion will actually materialize on schedule.

PS – While NYC’s subway has rats and Ninja Turtles, the Shanghai subway can boast of air-conditioning, underground cell phone service, safety barricades lining the platform, and to-the-second updates on arriving trains.