Hello, welcome to Roundtable, where we serve up piping hot debates on the issues that sizzle in China and beyond.
I'm Yeohong Lin. As cities grow and populations rise, so does the need for fast, interconnected travel.
China's intercity metro lines are bridging this gap, seamlessly linking cities and regions to foster economic and social ties.
What are the impacts on those who use these connections daily?
Right after the World Cities Day, let's take a look at the different ways these lines are transforming both cities and lives across the country.
For this episode, I'm joined by Yu Shun and Steve Hatherly.
Now, grab your virtual compass and follow us to the heart of the discussion.
What if your commute took you not just across town, but to an entirely different city?
With China's intercity subway expansions, the lines between cities are becoming less visible.
Cities like Guangzhou and Foshan, Shanghai and Suzhou are now closer than ever, thanks to transit links that offer faster, more affordable travel between urban hubs.
Could this be the future of interconnected urban living, or are the cities simply getting too big for us?
So to understand this, let's first talk about these intercity subways.
What are we talking about?
Can I just use these intercity subways to seamlessly travel from one city to another?
Yeah, so first of all, what we can see is that more and more cities are becoming closer to each other via these connection of intercity subway lines.
And what is so -called intercity subway line?
When we are thinking about it, maybe what we can think is that, okay, these subway lines are connected, but it's about two cities.
So when the subway systems of two cities are connected, allowing passengers to travel between them without, I think this is quite important, without exiting the station.
And the entire journey feels just like taking the subway within one city, so you're just, you're going to use only one cart to - No transfers, no nothing.
Maybe some, you need transfers, of course, but in the station.
Are these independent lines, I mean, not independently run, I mean independent of other subway systems, or are they attachments to previously existing subway systems?
Meaning is it a line that goes from A to B with a few stops in between, just one line itself?
Or when you arrive at your destination, you can transfer to an already existing subway system and carry on if you please?
Yeah, I think this is the case in your latter one.
Basically, there are two cities, two lines, and they maybe at some point, in some locations, there is an intersection.
And then you can transfer through the two lines and you can transfer through the two cities.
Very convenient. Yeah, and actually, that is a very important question that Steve has asked, because previously on the show, we talked about Tianjin, a city that is really close to Beijing, is also enjoying kind of an intercity railway, though.
That is the case that you still have to buy a train ticket if you're travelling between Beijing and Tianjin, yet there are almost every train, every 20 or 30 minutes.
So it's really convenient and a lot of people travel between these two cities.
Yet since it's still a railway, it's still not a subway, first of all, you have to purchase a ticket with your ID card.
And then even we are talking about the kind of convenience that people, when they finish travelling from, for example, Tianjin to Beijing, they can easily get from the railway station to the subway station.
Still, they need to do something about it, they need to travel the distance.
Yeah, and conversely, you still have to get to the railway station.
Not just hop on any subway station anywhere.
Yes. But what we're talking about today is a bit different.
It's basically blurring the line between these two cities.
This actually reminds me of when I was a little girl, I live in the city of Taiyuan, which is the provincial capital of Shenzi Province, and my grandparents live in adjacent little city that's, I think it's just too little for you to remember the name of the city.
But for me, the first several years that I can remember when I have to travel between these two cities, I have to actually hop on a green, quite slow train that takes around one and one and a half hours.
So it was quite, what I need to make the journey or make the travel, we need to carefully plan everything.
We have to think about the schedule of every day.
And later, there started to be a long distance bus, but it's still a bus and it covers more stops on the route, meaning that I can hop on any of the stop and go to another city.
And that has made the connection between these two cities much closer and making my trip much easier.
Well, consider yourself lucky because when I was growing up in Nova Scotia in Canada, if you weren't driving in the car, you weren't going anywhere.
There was no such thing as a subway from one city to another city, maybe a bus, but that would involve getting in the car to get to the bus station.
So when we talk about the upgrade of different transportation systems, we're literally talking about making the distance between two cities, between two places, closer.
So which are these really lucky cities that are enjoying this kind of transportation systems?
Yes. The one is, you just mentioned, Guanfu Metro, it is the metro that connecting Guangzhou.
We know that it is a big city and another city called Foshan.
So actually during this National Day holiday, I had the chance to experience this interconnected metro line.
It felt very convenient and smoothly, I think.
When we noticed that we have this choice to just use this kind of metro line to travel between these two cities, we just make all of our itineraries so flexible.
We don't need to plan ahead so many things.
We can just go hop on the underground.
Yeah, spontaneous travel is one of the benefits for people when you have this kind of system.
That's a relatively new line?
No, it is actually the first intercity metro rail line in China.
It is making this kind of system appeal to people's views and we realized that there is a possibility that these two cities, maybe they are close enough and we can have the choice of traveling between two cities with just subway.
This is actually very interesting because take a guess, how many passenger trips are made every day between Guangzhou and Foshan?
These are two cities we're talking about.
Yeah, you're talking number of passengers?
Number of passenger trips.
Probably hundreds of thousands, I would think.
1 .7 million. Yeah, right.
Wow. So people are actually… Well, if you think about it, people living in Foshan can work in Guangzhou, working in Foshan can buy a cheaper place with better living condition in Foshan.
These are basically so closely linked together that we do not see the line.
And in the same time, even though we say that this one is one of the first, well, it is the first intercity underground rail line in China, actually what they are currently doing is that this May, Guangzhou and Foshan as well, actually, Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhaoqing, Dongwen and Weizhou, these five cities are now
closely linked together by the intercity railways.
So this is one of the biggest ones and these cities are connecting closer and working to get what people working and living in these cities are interacting much more frequently thanks to the upgrading of the transportation system.
How long did it take you to get between the two cities?
I think it's about one and a half hours.
And we didn't plan anything because we just check out from the previous hotel and then we think, okay, maybe you have some time to linger on this city a little bit longer.
And then whenever we think it is ready, we can just get into the subway station and go to another destination.
And for us living here in Beijing, actually the Beijing subway line 2020, well, 22 is set to start operation in 2025, lasting over 81 kilometers.
It plans to connect the Chinese capital with Sanhe city, Hebei province, meaning that in the future when we hop on a subway, you're not only getting to the suburban area of Beijing, you can actually transport directly to Hebei, which is also quite nice.
And another funny example happens in Shanghai and Suzhou.
Oh, yes, let me do this.
Go ahead. Yes, I think I mentioned this previously in my Happy Place that Shanghai and the neighboring cities or this neighboring city Suzhou are connected.
And now Suzhou and my hometown, Wuxi, which is also quite close to Shanghai, will soon have an interconnecting subway as well.
And from then on, people from Wuxi will have the opportunity to reach Shanghai by subway and the exact time difference might not be clear yet now.
But I can imagine that for a, as you said, a spontaneous weekend trip, this subway will be so convenient that OK, we can just go travel to Suzhou maybe.
And then if I want, we can just go to Shanghai, Disney Resort for a bit of fun.
Yeah. I mean, for for traveling around during the daytime, an obvious advantage.
But this will affect commuting for a lot of people.
And because it affects commuting, it will affect housing, it will affect where people choose to live.
Life choices. Absolutely.
And the more convenient and the more interconnected these cities are, then the easier it is for people to make a decision.
You know, if you can get from outside of Shanghai or outside of Beijing, we talked about the fact and I even asked on the show, I think, oh, people who live in Tianjin, do they sometimes work in Beijing?
And I heard, oh, yeah, that's a really common thing, actually.
So we're going to find that example in various cities around the country.
And I was curious, is this something that's only happening so rampantly here in China that cities are getting closer and closer or are we seeing this trend, this city cluster development strategy in outside of China as well?
Living in Seoul for a very long time taught me a lot about the geography of the city, but also a lot about how public transportation works around there and speaking city to city.
Seoul is, if you're not familiar with the geography, it's in the northern part of South Korea, a little bit towards the western side of the country.
It's not fully to the coast, though, because on the coast, there's another city called Incheon.
And you can take the subway from Incheon, the subway, by the way, from Incheon to Seoul and back again.
There's bus routes as well.
There's tunnels that go underground for kilometers and kilometers and kilometers at a time.
You pop up in the middle of downtown Seoul coming from Incheon.
It's a really convenient and a really cool thing.
And it's the same thing for people who live in Incheon if they choose to do so.
They can save a lot of money on housing, rent or even purchasing a home and get to Seoul with no problem whatsoever.
So it does happen in other parts of the world, too.
Yes. And I get to see that actually there is a greater Manchester policy happening, including adjacent around 10 cities to the city of Manchester, making it almost almost a kind of an entire county.
Yeah, like a mega city.
Yeah, mega city concept.
But I was wondering with all these, why are people just, you know, include the part of Foshan as a part of Gwangju?
Why aren't we doing that?
I don't think people living in Foshan as, you know, people living in smaller cities would like these kind of plants, because I actually interviewed or just talk to some of the local people there.
They're saying we're just super satisfied with the life right now.
We can get to the bigger cities.
We have people from bigger cities like living in here or just travel to here.
We have a lot of business opportunities here just in this small city.
And we're quite satisfied with this.
But if you're saying that we if we are going to be a citizen of Gwangju, which is a big city, I don't like to do that because with that, inevitably the price of their life cost will be higher.
The housing price will be higher.
Schooling zones, right?
Because imagine that even if we're saying like property taxes.
Yes. You know, when we're thinking about suburban area in Beijing, the housing price may be still expensive than some of the smaller cities around Beijing.
So I think that is maybe what I can think of the ideas of people who live in smaller cities if their life is just quite good enough.
And I don't think they may like to get into a bigger status.
Well, for those of you who don't know this about me, myself, my major in college was resources, environment and the management of urban rural planning.
I can still remember.
Yes. Some of the theories we learned that is around the world or just across China, there are different development ways, different development paths that you can take.
For example, there can be mega cities, the mega cities, for example, Beijing and Shanghai.
There are definitely mega cities.
And when it's mega cities, it has its huge advantages.
For example, education resources, you have to admit one of the top universities here in China are located in Beijing and also medical resources.
Patients with kind of hard to cure diseases can actually come to Beijing and find the best of the best doctors.
So these are for the mega cities.
They can expand because they basically are shouldering the responsibility of providing these top notch services for the entire country or at least the mega region that they cover.
And also there's the development paths of city clusters.
That's what we're basically what we're talking about today.
That is, the cities do not have to merge into one huge city, yet they can be so closely interconnected that their advantages can be shared among that region.
Not only are we talking about Shanghai and Suzhou or Guangzhou and Fuzhen, actually the greater Bay Area, I'm pretty sure the area is not going to be integrated into one huge city, yet all the cities, the bigger ones as well as the small ones are closely linked with each other.
There's even the talk of a one hour living circle in this region.
So talk about that greater Bay Area.
That means the city of Zhuhai or just Guangdong area and Hong Kong and Macau area.
So people, I think they these three regions or areas, they are also getting closer, I think, with the interconnection of not only transportation, but also everything.
Economy resources, medical resources and education resources, they are getting so close.
And I think that, as you said, people living in one area, they can enjoy the benefits of all of these areas, warfare or anything.
So they can. This is the thing that I think that is so important that we develop this kind of strategy, making maybe smaller cities to enjoy the good things from the big cities around them.
And and it can also bring up maybe the economy and also some resources of the smaller cities, their own.
Yeah, it's like teamwork almost in a sense.
Right. And the development of regional integration is closely related to our topic for today, the construction of integrated rail transit and then with deepening construction of the integrated rail system, then the collaboration between mega cities and maybe smaller cities and then maybe even smaller
cities after that pooling their resources together, if you will, for the benefit of everyone.
When I was doing the research, I encountered a very funny example.
That's why I talked about the Shanghai Suzhou example as it's funny, because there is actually an airport.
You know, there is an airport in Suzhou.
You should be laughing.
Of course. That's in Uzi.
Oh, really? Yes. You mean the Sunan, Shofan airport?
I mean, the airport that does not actually has the ability currently the ability to allow any plane to actually take off.
What they do is they have this almost virtual airport airport in Suzhou.
You can go to the airport and they would transport you.
The airport is responsible for transporting you from Suzhou to the Shanghai airport and helping you take off there.
And the reason of the designing of this at the first place, I was a bit confused and I was like, huh, Suzhou people really want an airport even when they do not have the actual place for planes to take off.
They still want an airport.
And later I realized it's because people living in Suzhou transport to Shanghai quite so much.
They live in Shanghai, yet they still need to come back to Suzhou.
And sometimes when they land in Shanghai in, for example, late nights because of the schedule of the plane, it's hard for them to find a very fast and convenient way to go back to Suzhou directly.
And that's when they design the airport, making sure that if you're landing on, quote unquote, the Suzhou airport, actually, even though you're landing on Shanghai, someone would send you back.
And that is an example of how people are getting really creative when it comes to solving problems emerging because of the interconnectedness of different cities.
There's so many benefits from a city perspective when you have intercity rail.
One is transit congestion.
You don't have the same traffic that you do if you don't have that because people are forced to take cars.
Right. Which is obviously an example from many cities around the world how traffic can really ruin the commute and it can influence where people live as well.
Another advantage is for the environment, because if more people are taking these trains between two cities, then they're not driving their cars.
If they're not driving their cars, we talked about electric cars on the show not so long ago, but still gasoline powered vehicles still very commonly found.
So if they're not driving, then they're not using as much gas.
That's better for the environment as well.
Yes. And I was wondering, four different cities to better connect with each other.
Yes. We're doing something about the transportation.
We're setting subways, intercity subways.
But what are the other things that the government, local government, should do to make the connection even better and benefit more people?
You know, actually, when I was looking at these cooperation or just connection between these cities, I saw that it's not only about transportation, as we said, or I was talked about some of the medical insurance issues here in China.
When you maybe some of these policies are only effective in some areas or regions or cities here in China.
But when you're living in a city that nearby, you can still enjoy their benefits or the policy as well, because the whole system of medical insurance is connected nationwide, which means that when we have these kind of intercity subways, you can go to another city, enjoy their, you know, medical insurance
policies and also enjoy the transportation at the same time.
It is something that we can really feel no matter you are living in a big city or a smaller city.
Less smog in the cities as well.
I think when we're talking about environmental policies, there are so many added extra benefits from having intercity rails both for the people who live in the region, but also for the governments as well.
Less smog in the cities so you don't have to spend as much money on environmental policies for your city, which means you can take that money and you can put it into different areas for the benefits of your citizens.
Also, reverse sprawl.
High speed trains or just rail trains that connect cities reverse the tendencies for cities to sprawl as wide as they can with lots of new growth on the fringes.
And then you get a neglected city center.
There's just the list of benefits is very, very long.
Yeah. And before we get into another part of explaining these, I would like to also mention a point of how difficult it could be because we've been talking a lot, so many benefits of connecting to cities.
But when we're thinking about two cities, two metro lines, and they're connecting with each other, it is quite a huge project to do.
And I was thinking about this, you know, China may have started planning and setting up this initiative over a decade, actually, even though maybe we saw these metro lines is quite new or this kind of system is quite new.
But when I was thinking this back then, I noticed that China began implementing a nationwide transportation card.
You can use only one card to, you know, to use buses or subways in almost every city across the country.
And they also laid the I think this is kind of the groundwork that they're making up for connecting subway systems between cities and also, you know, making two cities because we can see so many situations that, you know, a subway station around us is kind of in construction and then it is affecting
so many activities in our lives.
But when we're thinking about the two cities, subways are connecting.
It is huge project to do and a huge planning to do as a major, you know, hat.
Yes, city planning.
And they're building more too, aren't they?
Especially high speed railways.
2023 report from China Traffic Networks.
Five high speed railways are being constructed around Hubei Province.
So they're going to make a two hour living circle, if you will, constructed within those high speed train regions in that province.
It's just getting it's getting bigger and bigger, but at the same time it's getting smaller and smaller as well.
And for those cities that are ready or getting ready to welcome more people to live and work and have fun in their cities, make sure the resilience of the city is also getting better, making sure that the city can actually hold that many people without compromising the environment or the living condition of whoever is there is another work that everybody is working
on and the future of urban living may indeed lie in these cross city networks that unite people, promote regional collaboration and inspire sustainable development.
