I used to have a part time job in the US counting cars. Well counting all forms of road users, in fact. Every time there's a new development planned, traffic counts are a required part of the environmental impact report. Hence the part time job.

It may sound tedious, or nerdy, but I always thought the results of such counts were pretty fascinating.

So today, on this lovely Tuesday afternoon, I decided to do one from my fourth floor balcony, which is perfectly situated to observe traffic in every direction at the intersection of Shulin Street (书林街) and Tiepi Alley (铁皮).

Here's what I found in the hour from 5:15-6:15 pm on November 13 2012:

Automobiles (including Taxis): 1000 (46%)
E-Bikes and Scooters: 720 (33%)
Bicycles: 320 (15%)
Pedestrians: 120 (6%)
Buses and Minibuses: 12 (0%)
Trucks: 4 (0%)

Obviously I'm aware of the onslaught of automobiles in Kunming in recent years, but I was honestly surprised to see automobiles so dominate these results. And I was dismayed to see bicycles so outnumbered. We can condensed those numbers further into just two categories:

Motorized: 1,736 (79%)
Non-Motorized: 440 (21%)

Why oh why don't more people bicycle? And on a clear day such as this! How sad.

So I'm curious if these results are confirmed or contradicted on the streets in your neighborhoods.

Are you willing to take a few minutes and do some car-counting yourself and add the results here? It won't take but 15 minutes of your time. Just extrapolate the data to one hour by multiplying by four (that's what I did).

Get a clipboard and divide a piece of paper into columns. Make sure to leave the biggest space for automobiles. Tell us the location and time of your count when you report the data back here. Thanks!

Wicker Basket has a nice all-you-can-eat Pancake breakfast (plus bacon and eggs and all-you-can-drink coffee) every Saturday morning

@tigertiger I bet they waste less energy than lit street signs in my country. In my country, spotlights mounted at the base of the street sign illuminate the entire sign. These new ones in Kunming only illuminate the text. I'm guessing they're LED-lit. Not only more energy efficient, but very cool-looking.

@bluppfisk

Good points all!

@tigertiger Having studied urban planning in the United States, urban density is the holy grail of the field. Every planner wants to increase density. The benefits of doing so are tremendous. Not just in preserving peripheral arable land (and I'm not sure why you say the undeveloped land around Kunming is not prime arable land - the fields of Chenggong are amongst the most valuable agricultural land in the China).

Other benefits include the efficiency of pairing density with urban mass transit. When there are enough people concentrated along transit corridors, it makes investments in subways and light rail much more logical. It also reduces the need for private automobiles. Low density suburban development, on the other hand, increases dependency on private automobiles, which in a knowledge-,tech-, and services-based economy are the primary contributors to urban pollution. It's true that Kunming is still transitioning from an industrial- to a services -based economy, and that in this type of economy factories still contribute significantly to pollution. But this would be the case regardless of urban density. And this will change, as China's cities move up the economic ladder.

Tiger, you're right that high density urban development has to be accompanied by sufficient investment in infrastructure, sewer, water treatment, etc. If its not then the density will become a liability.

The idea of urban gardens is a nice one, and in low density places like the United States and Australia it can work quite well. I'm not sure that China's urban population is culturally ready for that, however. These are people who only recently have left the countryside and probably think of farming as something they want to avoid. Besides, Chinese urbanites work such long hours I'm not sure when they would find time to tend to urban gardens. That said, if food prices do continue to rise, maybe this idea will become more popular. A lot of Kunming apartments grow flowers on their balconies. They could just as easily start growing vegetables.

Also, the statistic I have seen is that China has already reached 51% urbanized population. However, the definition of what is "urban" and what is not can lend itself to some distortion, so maybe we'll never know the exact answer.

By the way, I'd like to recommend an excellent report by McKinsey's Economics Research Unit on this very topic of urbanization patterns in China. In it, they analyze five different urbanization models, from highly concentrated to highly dispersed, and their effects on all different aspects of the economy and the environment. The PDF is available for free here:

www.mckinsey.com/[...]

@Liumingke1234 Couldn't disagree with you more! Those hi-rises ARE helping. The people are going to continue coming to the cities, and the cities aren't going to be able to continue gobbling up land forever. This is China. This is Asia. Hi-rises are the natural state of things.

@tigertiger

That 300/km2 overall density is a useless statistic. That is based on the 21,473 km2 that are technically defined as the "city of Kunming", but which in actuality mostly consist of farmland, mountains, and wilderness, stretching all the way up to Dongchuan and Lüquan counties along the Sichuan border. China calls these "Prefecture-Level Cities". I think this is a flawed nomenclature. They should reverse it to read "City-Level Prefectures". Even the densities you report for Wuhua, Panlong, etc are not truly representative of the urban density of Kunming. Wuhua and Panlong districts also include large chunks of farmland, mountain, and wilderness. Other Asian cities achieve densities in the range of 5000-10,000/km2. Kunming still has a long way to go. Now that it's building a subway system, it has every reason to concentrate density along those subway lines in TOD.