Nice so you don’t have to floor it to make a yellow or Kickstart your air-cooled motorcycle when a long red turns green.
The timing is off by 3 seconds to stop people from going just before it turns green. So people go 4 seconds early.
Thats neat!
What does 5th tier city mean?
So in China cities are unofficially ranked by tier. Tier 1 is Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, then theres like a couple dozen cities of 5-10m considered tier 2, Wuhan, Kunming, Xi’an, cities that are still very desirable in terms of economic development, tourism, education, etc. Tier 5 cities have less than a million people and even people from China might not know their names.
This one had half a million, and the housing situation was still quite good, inexpensive, quality high rises everywhere, the cheaper 5 story mixed use apartment streets seemed relatively well built, but it didn’t even have direct passenger service connecting towns in the area, it was merely a stop on a high-speed line between other cities, to get to a town 100 miles away, you had to take a high-speed train to a town closer to a major city, then a low speed train in the direction you came from.
Here’s some random pics, most of it looks like any of the other mundane parts of a chinese city.
TIL most of the US is “tier 5”.
Cities with < 1m population: San Francisco, San Jose, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Nashville, Denver, OKC. Austin is just 1m, Chicago 3m, LA 4, NYC 8.5.
Having ridden high speed rail through some of China, it was quite staggering to see the urban scale. And the sharp transition from high rise to farmland.
The US usually leaves towns legally distinct as they blend together. We tend to call the whole area by the city name, with only locals using the actual town names. Microsoft, for example, is based in Redmond, not Seattle. Google is based in Mountain View, Facebook is in Menlo Park, Apple is in Cupertino, and Intel/NVidia are in Santa Clara, but those are all San Fransisco to non-residents.
If you go by Metro Statistical Area (MSA), there are two cities over 10mil, 9 between 5-10mil, and 45 between 1-5mil.
