This passages quotes below are adapted from Richard Florida, The Great Reset.
Bold words are great expressions that are recommended by the writer.
We hope you can enjoy those mockery and sarcasm contained :)
The notorious traffic jam in Lanzhou is a quatidian experience for its residents and a common trash talk topic at table. If "He who has never been to the Great Wall is not a true man." is Beijing's chanting line, then, "He or she who has never first-handed the traffic jam in Lanzhou is not qualified enough to have a taste of Beef Noddles there." After all, without a flamboyant congestion in Lanzhou, life would be uncompleted.
As a geographically and economically 2.5-tier city, how could Lanzhou be pestered by this problem of 1-tier city. Besides that, the reason why Lanzhou, such an energetic city, has come such a long to keep pushing itself further, yet keeps failing to reach the at least 2-tier rank city in China, always puzzles me. Luckily, an article ran into me today, leading me to a possilble answer for this question.
In today's idea-driven economy, the cost of time is what really matters. With the consant pressure to innovate, it makes little sense to waste countless collective hours commuting. So, the most efficient and productive regions are those in which people are thinking and working - not sitting in traffic.
Just as the golden rule of property sector - "it's all about location, location, and location." The stymie that stands in the way of Lanzhou's and its people's further development is time, time, and time, the time they fail to protect from evil and endless commuting clog. Putting all the unhealthy psychological impact of traffic jam aside, only the time we spend being stuck on the road itself is enough to kill us.
The cost of long commuting hours are astounding. In Los Angeles, congestion eats up more than 485 million working hours a year; that's seventy hours, or nearly two weeks, of full-time work per commuter. In D.C., the time cost of congestion is sixty-two hours per worker per year. In New York it's forty-four hours. Average it out, and the time cost across Merica's thirteen biggest city-regions is fifty-one hours per worker per year. Across the country, commuting wates 4.2 billion hours of work time annually - nealy a full work week for every commuter. The overall cost to the U.S. economy is nearly $90 billion when lost productivity and wasted fuel are taken into acount. At the Martin Prosperity Institute, we calculate that every minute shaved off America's commuting time is worth $19.5 billion in value added to the economy. The numbers add up fast: five minutes is worth $97.7 billion: ten minutes, $195 billion: fifteen minutes, $292 billion.
It's undisputable that America's overall economy is way more powerful and stronger than that of Lanzhou's, but with an average of $19.5 billion in value added to America's economy after detracting its commuting time, the huge clogged time calculation of Lanzhou is stucked right there, under your nose. Productivity is the key, every company, every individual wants prolific days and accumulate them to a pleasant life. But time is the basis of all possibilities. Even a car can go at a crazy speed of 500 km/h, the speed is nothing but a line of introduction on the pamphlet with no second for the car to make a move.
With the right target at hand, what's the best way to tackle it?
It's ironic that so many people still believe the main remedy for traffic congestion is to build more roads and highways, which of course only makes the problem worse. New roads generate higher levels of "induced traffic", that is, new roads just invite drivers to drive more and lure people who take mass transit back to their cars. Eventually, we end up with more clogged roads rather than a long-term improvement in traffic flow.
Sometimes, more doesn't necessarily mean better. It's never about how many you have, but rather how many you can make great use of.
An anti-clog package with a well-designed road setting, highly efficient bus routes and plenty of convinenct and economical bike stations is probably the way out. But who really cares and gathers the suffienct courage to act on it. After all, we are told to appreciate what we have right now, even if it is killing us in a delicate way.
You see? Even a 6-year-old research can scare out my crap. Time does is money. But Lanzhou has been running out of both. Loooool.
