Originally Posted by
Skillet
Better in what way? How is it falling short of reasonable expectations?
It has enormous scope, is continuing to expand through the foreseeable future, is cheap as dirt and has a good safety record in comparison to say London or Boston. Moreover, it is air-conditioned and has decent mobile phone reception.
Try an articulated bus with wooden floors choking diesel fumes and so crowded you can't breath those fumes anyway.
+1
In spite of the annoyingly long transfers, Beijing's subway network is pretty damn impressive. Furthermore, Big Brother has mandated that all points within 4th Ring (a massive area... think Rhode Island) will be within 15 minutes walking distance of a subway station by 2020. To the best of my knowledge, no other city in the entire
world can boast such, or has aspirations of doing so. Oh, and it
will get built.
That having been said, we really need Tokyo style express trains (i.e. if they really care about Financial Street, it should be possible to get there from the CBD in 15 minutes, as opposed to 40 minutes). Many of us are looking forward to Line 6 because it will offer express trains. (I recently relocated to a building that has indoor access to a major Line 6 station, and can already envision a repeat of the Shuangjing success story.)
The bottom line is that everyone knows that the air pollution and the traffic are Beijing's two biggest drawbacks; subway expansion = 两鸟一石.