Urban Planning PartI – Highways

To anyone visiting Shanghai there are a few things you notice right off the bat.  If come in via the Pudong airport you are greeted by a huge and beautifully designed structure.  If you come if via Hong Qiao airport you see a smaller and quite used type facility but both of these airports share one simple thing, roads.  Each is connected to Shanghai’s surrounding highway system.  Poudong is 19 miles (30 Km) from Shanghai proper and it will take about an hour to get to one from the other.  Hong Qio is a mere 8 miles (13 Km) from down town Shanghai and the trip is more like 15 minutes to get there and getting out… well that’s a whole new blog article there.

When coming in from either airport you will have to get onto one of the local highways to get into the city.  To many this is their first taste of Chinese driving and road systems.  The first thing you notice is the crowded conditions of the road network.  For me it was the lack of speed once on the ‘open’ highway.  The connecting highways are modern 6 lane types, 3 in each direction, and elevated well above the surface streets, nearly 30 feet above and almost 40 in some places!  These highways are connected with two lane entrance and exit ramps and such at pretty close intervals.

As I stated earlier the roads are congested.  Speed limits range from 37 mph (60 km/h) downtown to 74 mph (120 km/h) on the outskirts.  Still speeds from about a 15 mile radius around Shanghai seldom get above 30 mph due to congestion and the layout of their network.  For many American’s the first thing you notice is the lack of collisions due to the driving style they use here.  Anyone who has driven in Chicago will understand this easily… Think of bumper to bumper traffic, with no turn signals most of the time, multiple lane changes, tail gating, and insane entrance/exit ramps.  For all things considered Chinese drivers are very good and very patient, despite all the horn honking, I have seen very few instances of road rage or aggressive driving anywhere on Chinese streets or highways… well they have a certain passive ‘I’m am going here and you are in my way so I am not moving’ kind of thing but tempers are not too bad.  Again this can be a topic all its own!

One thing you will notice as you are stuck in traffic, and if you come here it will happen, even at midnight, is the layout of the highways.  Chinese highways in Shanghai are designed for slow and metered traffic, yet the ramps are seldom metered.  A huge design flaw is present in every one of these systems… they use the same space for both functions!  That’s right, exit and entrance ramps share the same 40 feet of road.  People exiting are in the right hand lane crossing into the acceleration ramps of those trying to get onto the highways.  So you have cars slowing down and merging right while at the same times cars are speeding up and merging left, all onto the same 1 or 2 (if lucky) lanes of highway.  The far right hand lane allows drivers to bypass 2 or 3 intersections of ground level streets below if they are brave enough to enter the fray, adding a whole new wrinkle to the equation.

Add all this to a confusing network of roads that merge into and off of each other constantly until you are well outside of the city and you have a driving nightmare, hence the slow speeds.  I have also found a few highways that have huge round-a-bouts as interchanges, which offer a whole new meaning to getting stuck in the middle!  When traffic is heavy many drivers prefer to get off the highway and go through the round-a-bout which congests this area as normal users are navigating it also.  For many Americans this is a hard concept to envision.  There are 6 roads all connected by a large circle.  One is going north and south, one on the same level is going east and west.  If you have to go straight you just stay on the outside and make a slight turn.  If you want to make a U-turn you stay on the inside for most of the trip and maneuver to the outside 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through.  If you want to turn onto one of the right angle roads you stay on the outside and turn where you have to.  You have to pay attention as people from the outside are going inside and vice versa.  Now this particular one is of the two lane configuration, no problem.  The issue is there is a highway 15 feet above this round-a-bout running north and south and its exit and entrance ramps feed into the circle, so that is right you have 6 entry and 6 exit points and some idiots who love to transit the thing to save 10 to 20 seconds of time causing more congestion on the top and bottom parts of this large circle.

During rush hours you will see long lines backed up for over a mile in the right hand lanes as cars trying to get off the highways have to fight for space in the same lane as cars entering the highway.  This is not only inefficient, but hazardous for not only on and off merging traffic but for traffic down the road as they approach this long line.  Add aggressive taxi cabs that will pull off the famous American trick of flying past the long line of cars only to cut off a merging car at the last second to avoid the long line and you will get a potential danger zone of miles compressed into a 100 meter long zone.  Granted you seldom see accidents, just fender benders… but much more then in the states.  Accidents here are low mainly because the speeds are slower, much slower, allowing for more close calls, but fewer actual crashes.

In the US highway on and off ramps have dedicated lanes for the respective purposes, this makes for a safer and more efficient process of entering and exiting the highway system.  On ramps have acceleration lanes allowing cars to match or exceed traffic flow in order to get onto the highway safely.  Off ramps have deceleration lanes allowing cars to exit at near traffic flow speeds and safely reduce speeds before entering surface connecting streets below.  For interchanges we developed the cloverleaf system.  It forces drivers to slow down and to pay attention to where they are going.  Yes this can be a bit confusing and requires you to actually know where you are going/want to go but it allows for a much better flow of traffic.  Round-a-bouts are great at avoiding traffic jams caused by busy intersections, that is why they are deployed in the UK and Europe like they are, so traffic can flow more freely through bottlenecks and potential choke points then if they used the lighted intersection system the US uses.  In interstate or highway systems it is hazardous as vehicles are traveling at much more degrees of varying speeds and directions.

One good thing about the Chinese highway system is the amount of police on it.  In Shanghai almost every shared entry/exit point has a police officer their and during rush hour they will actually get out of their cars and direct traffic.  The presence keeps drivers honest and speeds slow, sometimes too slow.  Shanghai is a large city with many more cars then you would expect but still the traffic is always congested and slow.  Even Chicago and New York are easily navigate-able late at night and early in the morning, and not too bad at noon, here it is clogged nearly all the time, and really bad in the morning and from mid afternoon to mid evening.  I have never driven in L.A. so I can’t compare to this, which has the worst reputation for being clogged.

On the open highway different problems persist.  The speeds get to a normal range, 74 mph or 120 Km/h.  You will see the familiar 3 lanes, sometimes 2 but one very dangerous thing, traffic making a 4^th lane in the emergency lane.  Busses, delivery trucks, luxury cars, vans, construction vehicles all will use the far right hand lane as not only a passing lane, but as an overflow lane if the other 2-3 are moving too slow.  So if you have a flat tire and have to pull over and change it, pray it is on the right hand side of your car and you are on a long straight-away!  From the south to the central part of the country I have seen this as usual practice.  Nothing is more scary then being in this lane at night going around a curve in a huge tour bus going 120 km/h!

China is an emerging society into the world of automotive transportation.  They have access to very large and powerful vehicles yet their roads are not designed to accommodate speed, congestion, or continuous heavy usage.  The open roads are mostly long and flat which is good, but they still offer the same exit and entrance problems you see in Shanghai.  As more and more people turn to cars for personal transport they current system will fail.  Most of the highways here are large and relatively new, yet changing them will be a process that will be highly costly and disruptive (remember some highways sections are 40 feet above the surface and the real-estate needed to add the right lanes to fix the current situation is not available.  Better urban planning and longer range solutions and forethought are necessary to keep Shanghai and other emerging Chinese cities from painting themselves into a corner.