"Crying in a BMW" - The Ridiculous Social Stigma of Mass Transit

We know about the gender imbalance in much of Chinese society, in large part as a result of the One Child policy. Here's a silly and ironic story about the effects of this, plus urbanization, plus the rise of the market economy in those cities.

Douglas Raymond is a former Google executive who was trying to start his own company in China. When trying to hire employees, he realized that most Chinese engineers are usually only children who must be at the very top of their game in order to reap the most return on what's been a huge investment from (usually) his family to put him through a good school. This makes young Chinese engineers very risk averse when it comes to employment; so they're less likely to work with an untested start-up.

But to add to this risk aversion is the increasing expectation that, in order to sufficiently impress a woman that will marry him, a young man must already own, at the least, his own apartment. This is not easy in a place where many Shanghai and Beijing apartments often cost 27 times the average white collar worker's annual salary. Still, this expectation can exist because of the gender ratio: for every 119 men, there are only 100 women in Chinese cities, which allows women to have their pick of male partners. So with the increasing allure of material goods and capitalist comfort, home ownership is the mere cost of entry.

To illustrate this, Raymond recalled a popular television show called Fei Cheng Wu Rao ("If You are the One"), in which contestants make their pitches to eligible girls, who decide whether to choose or reject them. One male contestant tried to woo the girls by regaling them with promises to take his beloved around Beijing on the back of his bicycle, to show her the sites and experience love in his hometown. In her rejection, 20-year-old female contestant Ma Nuo replied, "I would rather be crying in a BMW than laughing on the back of a bicycle."

Soon after the airing of the comment, the Chinese government forced the creators to change the format of the show to discourage the kind of superficial and materialistic morals this comment, and the show, ostensibly promoted. Nonetheless, the clip and quote went viral, and spoke not only to changing urban Chinese values, but also to important symbols, namely that Beijing's nouveau riche are ditching their bicycles, buses, and trains in favor of (fancy) cars as modes of transportation. It evokes Margaret Thatcher's extremely dangerous quip that, "if a man finds himself riding a public bus at the age of 28, he can consider himself a failure."

If China's burgeoning upper-middle class all wants to drive cars, and that desire turns into pressure to build infrastructure to accommodate cars, we'd see a whole mess of problems: more pollution (on the scale that leads to health problems); congestion (on the scale that leads to not just frustration but also inefficiencies...that can compromise life quality); spatial design that separates people, things, and places (and makes the economy less efficient); to say nothing of the environmental and monetary costs associated with constructing and maintaining that car infrastructure. Mass transit presents an alternative that addresses all of these problems through economies of scale.

But the social association between type of mobility and socio-economic status is one of the biggest hurdles in making those necessary investments in a responsible manner. Ma Nuo derided bicycles in favor of a gleaming car (even if it cost her happiness). And in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States, the mass transit rail has long been associated with the poor and downtrodden: its MARTA system is derided with the acronym, "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta," referring to the poor Black Americans who are the system's captive users (they don't have the choice of driving). This association makes it less likely that affluent (White) Atlantans would use the system willingly. Similarly, when the recently installed Pope rode the subway in Buenos Aires, the media took this as evidence that he is "pro poor".

The solution to this problem is, of course, to make mass transit so efficient, effective, (fun), safe, and comfortable that people don't use it simply because it is cheaper, but because it is better than driving a car. The way to do that---in Latin America, the United States, China, and elsewhere---is to give it the resources it requires to keep it in top shape. This is largely a challenge for politics, to ensure that priority and resources are given to transit. But it's also one for economics: running good transit systems, despite their economic benefits, comes with large financial costs, including necessary subsidies for riders, and expenses for operations, management, maintenance, and capital expansion. (I'll have a post forthcoming on how Hong Kong, one of the best run transit systems in the world, pulls this off).

Still, as China---and even the US---go forward, we ought to try and remember what Gustavo Petro, the Mayor of Bogota (which developed the world-renowned Bus Rapid Transit System, TransMilenio), said: "A developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It's where the rich use public transportation."

Groped on the Subway - When Eyes on the Platform Aren't Enough

A couple of months ago, the New York Times posted this piece by a woman who was groped on a crowded subway in New York City. 

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/i-was-groped-on-the-subway/

In a nutshell, she discusses her experience on her daily commute on a crowded subway, where, one day a lecherous and disgusting man gropes her. Though dozens if not hundreds of other passengers are mere inches away, they don't say a thing or intervene. And despite the numbers, she doesn't feel comfortable yelling or asking for help, and feels completely vulnerable and alone throughout the ordeal. When she gets off the train, a plainclothes police officer, having witnessed the crime, calls her over and asks her to identify the perpetrator, whom the officer has detained. The lady does so only reluctantly, fearing some sort of retaliation. The whole experience gives her a number of insecurities about interacting with the world, making her especially afraid of riding the train at rush hour.

You should definitely read the piece in full---I would never be able to capture or relay a harrowing episode like this with the same sense of pain, violation, shame, fear, and loneliness. I hope that her story did eventually end in some kind of more solid triumph. But sexual harassment is an all-too frequent occurrence on mass transit, certainly in places like NYC. Probably every woman in transit-oriented cities have their own story about this, and it adds to the reasons that people abandon public transportation. The piece raised a few important points with regard to what I've been thinking and writing about here. Despite everything the piece made me feel on a visceral level, I'll keep this discussion to one that's policy and planning oriented.

First, I wrote a few weeks ago about the "eyes on the street" concept of, for lack of a better word, community policing. Again, this is the notion that if you design a space so that there are people present at all times, passively keeping a watch over it, criminals are less likely to perpetrate crimes. This remains true; imagine what might happen without those eyes. But what about those other times, where dozens or even hundreds are watching, but that's still not enough to deter crimes, especially of a sexual harassment nature? 

A famous story that comes to mind is one in which a woman named Kitty Genovese was violently assaulted and screamed for help, with a handful if not dozens of neighbors hearing what happened but not even moving a muscle to help her or call the police. The episode was later reported to have been exaggerated. Still, the scenario was tested under controlled circumstances: grey smoke was billowing out of a room and when there was a sole witness, ze called the fire department immediately. But when dozens of people walked by and all saw the same smoke, and watched other people seeing the same smoke, nobody was compelled to act. "If they're not concerned or doing anything about it, it's probably not a big deal. Why should I intervene either?"

There might be a similar dynamic at play in crowded subways: if other people see it, and are okay with this groping, it's probably not that big a deal, so why should I do anything? It's a strange sort of social paralysis brought on by embarrassment...of disturbing the stability of the status quo. (Or maybe people are just too crowded and wrapped up in their own minds to realize or care about what's happening to others around them?)

The first priority, of course, ought to be to teach men not to be lecherous or worse. More on that in a moment. Second, in addition to creating a space where women feel safe, we ought to create a space where witnesses feel safe and responsible to intervene in things they realize are wrong. Public policy can help shape that: signs and announcements in the NY subway have recently begun to exhort victims and witnesses to intervene, call police, and speak out when sexual harassment takes place; and remind riders that sexual harassment is indeed a crime that must be stopped. It'd be interesting to find stats on what kind of a dent that's made in interventions or reporting.

Then there are always the more subtle ways of intervening in a burgeoning problem without even making a big deal of it; this guy intervened in a fight just by casually walking in the middle while still eating his snack:

And this intervention is related to my second big takeaway from this Times piece: how pleasantly surprised I was to read that a police officer not only recognized that this happened, but also intervened and attempted to bring the criminal to some kind of justice. This does not happen enough: victims are blamed, or often not even recognized as victims and dismissed. In an ideal world, the official police would not have to have a role in enforcing gender violence norms, as the problem would be effectively dealt with by society. But in the world in which we live, law enforcement plays an extremely important function.

And getting law enforcement to care comes back to that "first priority" identified above: to teach men not to be lecherous or worse---and to teach people to intervene when they bear witness to a crime. Awareness really is the beginning of that, and sharing information a big component therein. In Egypt over the last few months, reports have shown that over 99.3% of women have been sexually harassed in their daily lives (with some particularly gruesome cases of gang rape and molestation), yet in less than 14% of those cases did someone try to help. Much as Chinese women have been able to take to Weibo to share information about this while saving face, the creators of HarassMap are trying to leverage technology to get Egyptians to share information about incidents and map them for better societal awareness. Actually seeing and hearing about incidents really brings it home to people in ways that matter; it's less of an abstract idea that happens to "someone else." Once that societal awareness and concern is strong, it would more easily filter up into police training, if it's still needed at that point.

Of course, coming back to the notion of culture and sexual aggression we'd discussed before, that awareness goes much deeper. Chris Kilmartin, author of "The Masculine Self," says that the source of sexual violence is a "cult of hyper-masculinity, which tells boys that aggression is natural and sexual conquest enviable, and a set of laws and language that cast women as inferior, pliable, even disposable...'we teach boys to disrespect the feminine and disrespect women. That’s the cultural undercurrent of rape.'" Try to tackle that, and we'll be riding on a much safer train.

But the first step to ending a huge problem is to recognize when it recurs right in front of all of our eyes.

Gender in Beijing Transit - a conversation with the Lincoln Institute's Zhang Chun

I recently had a great conversation about transit development in China with my PKU colleague, Zhang Chun. She’s written a lot about the subject, including for a recent World Bank project on transit accessibility of the urban poor. In addition to transit, Zhang Chun and I spoke about broader gender issues in Beijing’s development.

So's to start: the first two lines of the Beijing Metro---Lines 1 (an east-west line) and 2 (a circular line that goes around the Forbidden City---were originally developed, starting in in 1969, for the exclusive use of the People’s Liberation Army. They were only made public in 1980 and expanded in 2004. The development of roads was under the central Ministry of Roads, while subways was under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rail, which no longer exists. (It's been broken into Ministry of Transport, which covers safety and regulation; the State Railways Administration, which does inspection; and China Railway Corporation, which oversees construction and management. As for funding, municipalities must fully fund and manage subway systems by themselves. (The case of Beijing is a little different, as it's also the national capital, giving it access to a few more resources and priorities than other cities might get).

It was only from 2003 that the Beijing authorities thought to develop subway transit with greater seriousness. They did this largely because they realized the folly of what they had been doing: Beijing's local automotive industry had long put a choke hold on the city's planning, so roads were prioritized over mass transit (and rail) lines, leading to massive traffic congestion and air pollution. What really spurred the authorities on to change things, of course, was the public relations surrounding the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Here's a great gif showing the evolution of Beijing's subway system:

So owing to these weird administrative snafus, and also the relative recentness of the subway's development, Beijing’s bus system is actually more extensive, more prolific, cheaper, and more used for mass transit. Both the bus and subway systems are heavily subsidized in Beijing. The Beijing subway system costs only two yuan to get anywhere within it, whereas other cities have fare systems that are priced according to how far and which districts you travel. (Guangzhou can go as high as 10 or 15 yuan for a ride).

The buses are managed in a very interesting way: there’s usually a male driver and a female conductor who collects tickets and keeps folks in the bus in line. In fact, it is the conductor’s responsibility to find a seat for pregnant women, old people, or the infirm (subways also put 'people with children' in this category)---and if these people are unable to find a seat and something happens to them, the conductor is liable. In the subway, on the other hand, there are signs that tell people to vacate certain seats for “those in need,” including the old, pregnant, with children, or infirm, but in practice that is not enforced and depends on how generous straphangers are feeling. This lack of certain provision makes it a little difficult for “those in need.”

This provision is among the biggest issues for women’s access, as discussed in my earlier post on transit access. Women with children usually have to carry their carriages down stairs, because only the newest stations and transit hubs (those that connect a few lines) will have elevators. Because of this, many women simply hold their children in their arms instead of bringing a whole carriage. (Plus carrying a carriage or bassinet in a crowded Beijing subway can be pretty unwieldy and tough. Not to mention, prams or strollers are actually a pretty recent arrival in China; parents have long preferred to hold their children in their arms).

Shanghai and Hong Kong have better transfer systems within subways (i.e. between different lines at transit hubs), which makes it easier to bring a bassinet or child across a system. Beijing, however, has been less good at this, making the subways in Beijing less accessible to the non-young. It’s been built into the urban planning building code, which is fairly strict in Beijing, that a subway station entrance cannot be kept close to any building, which makes it that much more difficult to access transit. This was owed to the earlier development of underground utilities such as pipes and electric wiring.

On the related note of women's travel patterns, China has mandated maternity leave of four months. And yet, there is no daycare provision until a child is 2.5 years old. Hence, between four months and 2.5 years, the child has minimal institutional support and the mother has to figure out how to take care of hir while the mother is working. Double income families were often the norm among Chinese couples, particularly before 2000, when the one-child policy was relaxed in urban areas. But the income of one person was insufficient to pay for a nanny while the mother worked (a nanny cost almost the mother’s salary). So instead, many women have simply been staying home as housewives instead of returning to their jobs after giving birth, while others keep young children with grandparents as babysitters. This lifestyle change altered transit patterns, to say nothing of economic and physical mobility.

In the 1990s, the worker welfare system was ‘reformed’ and essentially stopped nationally, with worker-provided public housing being terminated. (Prior to that they were heavily subsidized, with public housing residents paying as little as 21 yuan per month). But less than 1% of government employees have public housing, and more recently, a few companies have been providing their workers with 13,000 yuan to simply purchase their own houses. As the housing market has been privatized, many are forced to live farther and farther away from their places of work, given that central business district and central city housing prices have gotten so high.

This has been maybe the greatest folly of Beijing's urbanization, even with its emphasis on mass transit development: markets are increasing space and distance between buildings and neighborhoods, and even between uses (e.g. home and work). So even though density remains pretty high (compared with the US, for example), sprawl is still going pretty wild. And because, as the capital, Beijing serves as a model for the rest of the country, the tenets of its growth are affecting planning patterns elsewhere in the country. Without some fresher thinking, China's urbanizing billion---including its 500 million women---will have a number of difficulties adjusting to city life.