At the start of the 15th century, when the Ming Dynasty was young, Beijing was established as the new Chinese capital — a heavily planned city, a rectangle laid out on a north-south axis around the great imperial palace, the Forbidden City. Continue reading at cotch dot net…
Last week I posted about tracked hovercraft and straddling buses — a tongue-in-cheek look at how through the ages engineers have proposed ever more overcomplicated engineering solutions in an attempt to manage our out-of-control transport problems. I assumed that my learned readers would get the point without labour. WordPress.com very […]
I bought a second hand copy of Traffic In Towns, the 1963 Buchanan Report to the Minister of Transport on the future of urban mobility and development. It’s fabulous sci-fi full of depictions of the future of British cities, except that it was never intended as sci-fi but as a […]
Over at At War With The Motorist, I look at another of the obvious ill-effects of Beijing’s burgeoning car dependency — the plague of badly parked cars filling the pavements and cycle paths. You can read it here. Also, try out our China traffic quiz: what’s wrong with this picture?
Melinda Liu in Newsweek, on sitting the written exam for a Chinese driving license: The most memorable question is the one about intestines. Specifically, it’s a multiple-choice question about what to do if you come across a traffic accident victim with an open abdominal wound from which the small intestine […]
Continuing the China strand on At War With The Motorist, exploring questions that aren’t easy to answer. The main conclusions are that an absolutely staggering number of people die on China’s roads each year, and they do so because on their anarchic roads, inexperienced Motorists drive like idiots. The more […]
At At War With The Motorist, I continue the threads on the concept of shared space and on transport in Beijing, looking at how roads work and how road users behave in a city where traffic management is meaningless, and the road belongs to whoever can take it. Read it […]
From At War With The Motorist today… From the World Health Organisation’s Multi-Sectoral Forum on Road Safety in China (March 2008), on driving in a country where over a quarter of a million die on the roads each year: Both lack of awareness to risks and inexperience means that people […]
Over at Journalology I discuss the issue of academic fraud in China, again. Academic fraud is an issue that few take seriously enough anywhere, and while China has a particularly big fraud problem, I worry that people allow that to distract them from the fraud problem at home. Read it […]
In a hit-fishing exercise on Journalology, I make contrarian suggestions and gross allegations on the subject of scientific misconduct in China. You can bite here.