A vision of Hell

Beijing in the morning rush hour.

I do from time to time have to get to early work appointments - but not usually very early, and not usually in the CBD. It's four years now since I last had a job that required a regular early-morning commute.  I reflect that whenever I have had such a job in Beijing, I have become homicidal/suicidal within a month or so.

And this, four, five, six, seven years ago.  Things are so much worse now.

I had been blissfully unaware of just how much worse.

The subway lines - between 8am and 9am - are jam-packed.  We don't yet have liveried attendants pushing people into the trains as in Tokyo, but we do occasionally get enterprising - impatient - punters trying to take on such a role themselves.  Even Line 10, which is relatively short and has rather limited connections to the rest of the network, nevertheless, because it serves the CBD, is - in the eastbound direction - absolutely heaving.  The line 10/Line 5 interchange is so overcrowded - and the connection between the two lines so poorly designed - that the station staff, in order to ease congestion by opening up separate entry and exit points for the Line 5 platform, have to disable the ticket barriers so that transferring passengers can, in effect, leave the station and come back in again. It is utterly daft. And a woeful indictment of the massive underestimate of the number of users the city's subway planners have evidently been guilty of.  Yesterday, at around 8.25am, people were queueing twenty or thirty deep to try to get on to an eastbound Line 10 train, and they wouldn't get to the front of the line and be able to board until two or three trains had come through. I very nearly gave up and left the station - to get a gulp of fresh air.

When I did go above ground - which I did twice, at Dongzhimen at around 8am, and at Sanyuan Qiao at about 8.40am (I was trying to get to a meeting out near the airport) - I found eastbound traffic at a virtual standstill and NO CABS FREE.

So, I began yesterday by spending nearly two-and-a-half hours trying - and failing - to get to a business meeting, fully two thirds of that below ground, being compressed by a smelly mob.  I did not, in fact, manage to get more than a few miles from my home in all that time.  The airport, a tantalising fifteen or so more miles away, might as well have been in another country.

As is the invariable way of the world, I finally located an available cab just as I'd given up and started to head home. By that point, I was probably going to have been at least half an hour late; with heavy traffic on the Airport Expressway, maybe an hour or more. And it was going to be a completely bloody pointless meeting, anyway.

Beijing, ah, Beijing - Beijing is a city in crisis. Its transport infrastructure has completely melted down. The roads are so congested that the CBD - and, as often as not, pretty much the whole east side of town, and the airport too - is effectively inaccessible during the working week (other than via the oppressively overcrowded and not terribly efficient or comprehensive subway network). The city is ceasing to function. And I don't think anyone's got a clue what to do about it.