Nice so you don't have to floor it to make a yellow or Kickstart your air-cooled motorcycle when a long red turns green.
The timing is off by 3 seconds to stop people from going just before it turns green. So people go 4 seconds early.
In Montreal there was a community, a burrough, were they specifically had signs posted that said the lights are timed, if you speed you will make none of them. It was amazing to just coast along at exactly the speed limit, and face no challenges. Great for drivers and pedestrians and the community as a whole. There was so little road/vehicle noise in the area, no screeching about or road raging, it was just awesome.
5the tier city?
So in China cities are unofficially ranked by tier. Tier 1 is Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, then theres like a couple dozen cities of 5-10m considered tier 2, Wuhan, Kunming, Xi'an, cities that are still very desirable in terms of economic development, tourism, education, etc. Tier 5 cities have less than a million people and even people from China might not know their names.
This one had half a million, and the housing situation was still quite good, inexpensive, quality high rises everywhere, the cheaper 5 story mixed use apartment streets seemed relatively well built, but it didn't even have direct passenger service connecting towns in the area, it was merely a stop on a high-speed line between other cities, to get to a town 100 miles away, you had to take a high-speed train to a town closer to a major city, then a low speed train in the direction you came from.
less than a million people and even people from China might not know their names.
Holy shit, that's some pretty wild perspective I've just been handed. I'm my country, there is like 1 city with a population of more than 1 M. And that's not really even in the city part of the city, which has less. Very interesting.
TIL most of the US is "tier 5".
Cities with < 1m population: San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Nashville, Denver, OKC. Austin is just 1m, Chicago 3m, LA 4, NYC 8.5.
Having ridden high speed rail through some of China, it was quite staggering to see the urban scale. And the sharp transition from high rise to farmland.
The US usually leaves towns legally distinct as they blend together. We tend to call the whole area by the city name, with only locals using the actual town names. Microsoft, for example, is based in Redmond, not Seattle. Google is based in Mountain View, Facebook is in Menlo Park, Apple is in Cupertino, and Intel/NVidia are in Santa Clara, but those are all San Fransisco to non-residents.
If you go by Metro Statistical Area (MSA), there are two cities over 10mil, 9 between 5-10mil, and 45 between 1-5mil.
America has like 3 real cities, nyc, Chicago, DC, Boston.
If you need a car to get around you don't have a city, you have an overgrown suburb.
i'd remove Chicago and DC, and add Philadelphia.
DC is fine but as soon as you leave downtown it becomes barely better than the american norm (the subway is honestly hilarious, "downtown largo" yeah right lmao by that logic NYC is "downtown USA").
Basically the same with Chicago, it's "fine" but very quickly the subway just stops and it's back to an endless sea of dogshit suburbia.
NYC and Boston are the only ones i would confidently call "actually acceptable", and even then Boston only qualifies because the downtown-fenway-brookline corridor is effectively a transplanted piece of NYC..
Like, fuck.. Literally just hoboken is a more proper place than all the other american cities, it's insane.
Interesting, thank you for explaining! Envious of that food, that looks delicious and like a lovely spot to sit and enjoy a meal ☺️
Just ordered a taxi in Beijing, a 1 tier city, and were 1st timer surprised to watch amap show my taxi wait for the countdown and then approaching me (they only wait for green at big crossings, btw). I also used amap to book the ride. Not really sure how useful it is for getting a ride, but pretty novel to watch.
How do you like Beijing? The scale is kinda insane. "OH I'll just take the subway" and its like 5 hours.
I use didi when I need to book a ride, but that's almost never given how ubiquitous and cheap meituan ebikes or scooters are, when subways, trains, and buses fail me.
You pay like 2 dollars and then you can ride yellow escooters for 15 cents for 20 minutes for 10 days or bicycles literally free for a month. Only works for the city you buy it in btw.
Some buses don't come up in amap btw, I have to ask around.
Transnational trains don't show up in any app, you have to book them at the station they depart from, cash only.
Tangentially related but also interesting, A Map labels neither Palestine nor Israel, going for the less well known 0 state solution.
Cool. Which app is that? It has a nice and clean interface
Amap. I tried baidu maps, but the interface was painful.
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.