Hyde Park Urbanist

You're Beautiful

You really are beautiful, precious reader, but that's also an English-language title for a Korean miniseries I just finished.  (Sometimes. it's referred to as "He's Beautiful".)  The premise is that a girl raised in a convent has to substitute for her twin brother in a Korean boy band.  One of the band members, Shinwoo, senses from the beginning that Minam is a girl, but keeps it to himself.  Another, Taekyung, finds out early on and confronts her, while the more oblivious Jeremy is in the dark until well into the series.  Naturally, all three fall in love with her.

I found "You're Beautiful" unsatisfying as a series, but the Jeremy character is pretty amazing.  He's a bleach-blond straight guy with a dog named Angelina Jolie.  Perpetually upbeat & clownish, Jeremy's the best at cheering up the boy/girl Minam as she copes with her many challenges.  Ah, but how does Jeremy overcome his own dark moods?  In an early episode, he shows Minam his secret-- there's a usually empty city bus designed for tourists that takes an hour-long circular route.  He gets on this "Treasures Bus" at one stop, rides the bus for an hour to brood, then gets off at the point he got on, refreshed.

Now we flash forward about ten episodes.  Minam has divulged to the band that she's really a girl and Jeremy's decided to make his big play for her.  He's scheduled to be part of a live radio program that Minam will be listening to.  At the beginning of the two-hour show, the host announces that Jeremy will sing a special song at the end of the program.  Then he finds out that Minam and Taekyung are dating.  He goes nuts and disappears.  His manager and Minam search frantically for him because he's promised to close out the radio show and Minam feels awful.  Of course, she remembers the bus, which is where this heart-wrenching 7-minute video clip picks up.

Minam finds the right Treasure Bus.  Jeremy tells her to get off his bus because she's breaking his heart.  She stays.  They ride for a bit, both glum.  He gets out his cell phone and calls the radio station just at the end of the live broadcast, telling them he'll sing over the phone.  The song he's chosen is a cheerful ditty about the Korean words for "I Love You".  He gives it a chirpy start, breaks down while singing that his heart is "thumping with joy", but soldiers on.  He finishes the song and hangs up, then tells her that, after they get off at the next stop, he'll be "fun-loving Jeremy again" and she must forget everything said on the bus or he won't be able to regain his former self.  He deboards.  She hesitates.  He turns around, smiling big, and beckons.  Once she deboards, he throws an arm around her and asks, "Go Minam, do you want to go get ice cream?"

Using a near-empty tourist bus as a place to brood for an hour before picking yourself back up?  I feel Jeremy deserves some kind of special award for that, for all of that.

Creative Parking in Beijing

Don't even bother starting this video unless you have 2 minutes, 30 seconds to watch it to the end.  However, I'm betting you're patience will be rewarded.

June 21 Shoreland Meeting

The Shoreland project is so cool that I don't even mind doing a little advertising for Mac Properties.  June 21 at 6:30pm at Montgomery Place is the time and place for this update:

Transit on Steroids

Central planning, I would submit, works best in areas where goals are obvious and quantity trumps quality.  Vaccinations, basic literacy, mass production of anything-- these are goods that call for centralized planning.  I'd include public transit with those, but only to a point.

Let's consider the building of subways in Beijing:

In 2005, the Beijing Transportation Development Programme (2004–20) was issued to speed up the construction of a comprehensive public transportation system focusing on rail transit and large capacity rapid transit systems and buses as the base. In 2006, the general concept of giving priority to the development of public transportation was revealed in the View on Giving Priority to the Development of Public Transport...

Subway lines 4, 5, 8, 10 and the Airport Line began operating in 2009, bringing the combined track length of the subway to 228 kilometres; the intervals of trains was shortened 2 minutes, 15 seconds for Subway Line 1, 2 minutes for Line 2 and 3 minutes for lines 5, 13 and the Batong Line. Subway lines with a single price of 2 yuan carried 34 percent of public transportation passengers in 2009, 14 percent more than in 2008.  

According to the Municipal Commission of Development and Reform, in 2009, nine subway lines now under construction—Line 6 Phase I, Line 8 Phase II, Line 9, Line 10 Phase II, Line 15 and the Daxing Line in Daxing District, the Fangshan Line in Fangshan District, the Yizhuang Line in Daxing District and the Changping Line—will add up to 209 kilometres of track length to the system.

The CTA has 224.1 miles of track and 144 stations.  Beijing's subway has about the same number of stations on 142 miles of track-- but the size of Beijing's system will probably double over the next ten years.  That's the magic of quantity in a centrally planned economy.

Ah, but what about quality?  An express train runs from the Beijing airport to the rest of the subway system and it's very fast.  However, consider this eyewitness report:

There is no place for big luggages in the train and you have to put your luggages in the aisle. When I get off at the Dongzhimen station, I was disappointed again. You will have to carry your big luggages by hand because there is no escalator here too just like the Xizhimen transfer station. I talked to the security guy and he told me that all the passengers from the airport have to use the stairs and he heard lots of complains about this issue.

Or, as visiting writer-in-residence James Fallows put it during a recent lecture I attended: the express train is very convenient to take from the international terminal, as long as you're not arriving with any luggage.