Hyde Park Urbanist

Beijing Tips: #1 Subway Tickets

Beijing's subway system is super.  For 2 yuan-- that's 30 cents!-- you can zip across the city on clean, mostly new trains.  The biggest downside is that it's too popular, so popular that during rush hours you may have to stand in a slowly moving line to get on the train.

Buying single tickets can be complicated.  The ticket machines will process your order entirely in English if you choose, but the machines have a secret: they won't take 1 yuan notes.  You have to use coins or a 5 yuan note or buy at the counter.

The workaround is to buy a transit card at the counter.  The card costs 20 yuan (about $3) and you have to put at least another 30 yuan on the card.  They're easy enough to buy, you just pass along a 50 yuan note to the clerk and say "IC Card".  (The clerks don't give change, though, so if you hand them a 100 yuan note, you'll get back an IC Card with 70 yuan for rides.)  You can then re-charge the cards at the machines if you need to.  The IC Cards also give you a discount for bus rides, knocking down the fare from 1 yuan to about half that-- so a bus ride with an IC Card costs about a nickel.  And you can even use the IC Cards in taxis if you present the card at the beginning of the trip.  

My advice would be to fork over 50 yuan for the IC Card no matter how long you're in Beijing.  Seven bucks means you get fifteen subway rides with free transfers and you don't have to sweat individual tickets.  If you have rides left over, you can give someone else the card.

On the subway, whether you buy an individual ticket or an IC Card, you have to use your ticket again at the exit gate on your way out the station, so keep it handy.  At present, there's no extra charge for distance, but the mechanisms for doing so are already in place.

Cars Are Ruining Beijing; Drum & Bell Tower Development

I'm in Beijing.  It's about 4 o'clock in the afternoon and most of my gentle readers are sleeping.  Beijing is a bit restful today, too, because it's a holiday-- the second of three days of the Mid-Autumn festival.

But the work of the Hyde Park Urbanist is subject to no holidays, although this dusty blog may have been giving a different impression, of late.  No, whatever time it is, whatever day it is, wherever I roam, it's my forlorn duty to complain about cars.  And while the capitol of China is a wonderful place all in all, with a Wow! around every corner, I have to tell all who will listen that cars are ruining Beijing.

Take a look at the photo above.  The right half is a sidewalk.  Oh, don't be fooled by the cars parked on it, it's really a sidewalk, right in front of what used to be Furen University, a Roman Catholic institution from the early 1900s.  On this otherwise peaceful street, we can also view cars parked across the street and two cars battling it out for who gets to drive down what's really about one and a quarter lanes.

Ah, but all is not lost.  Take a long, relaxing look at pic-right.  That's Lake Houhai on a crisp, September afternoon.  Lucky for us, personal automobiles are not built to run atop water, so we're spared the site of a lake of parked cars.

In the background are the Drum and Bell towers, a remarkable set of landmarks and major tourist destination.  The neighborhood around the towers is made up of hutongs, or narrow lanes.  These courtyard homes are primitive, often without running water and the bathroom is usually down the street, shared with a hundred neighbors.

The neighborhood may change drastically soon and residents are not all of one mind about the coming development.  Uprooted residents will be compensated and many would like to move to modern apartments, even though they'll probably have to live a much longer distance from the city center.  Still, the little I've seen about the development plan makes it look, well, undesirable-- an underground museum devoted to time-keeping.  Development is a complicated issue in Beijing, but the Drum and Bell Towers neighborhood is an area the city would do well to treat gingerly, if you ask me.  Which no one is.