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>and everything set up for cars. I've lived in Shanghai and currently live in Singapore, and Singapore seems waay more car-centric, more like an American city than anything I've seen in China. Really wide roads almost everywhere, mandatory car parking in office buildings, scarce crossings, some incredibly pedestrian-unfriendly intersections. As an example, there are + intersections where only 3/4 of the possible crossings are supported, so as a pedestrian you may have to wait for three sets of traffic lights just to cross from one side of the road to the other (e.g. first down, then across, then back up again, like 🠓🠒🠑). The cars also seem to drive way faster than Shanghai, maybe because there's less congestion (it's a wonderful city to be a driver). It also has pedestrian crossing lights that only activate upon a button press, so if you're even a moment late you have to wait until the next set of red lights (whereas in Shanghai the pedestrian light is always enabled). The most egregious example of this is the crossing in Raffles Place from Pekin street over Telok Ayer to the indoor hawker centre. Or more accurately, the lack of a crossing, so that every lunchtime and rush hour masses of people have to scuttle nervously across the road as angry drivers zoom by. Compared to the other cities I've lived (Melbourne, Sydney, Shanghai), Singapore is by far the most stressful to be a pedestrian for me. |
Most of Shanghai has really wide, four lane roads or wider in the new built areas that are most of the city like Pudong or Qingpu. The rest sounds worse in Singapore but the only parts of Shanghai with narrow streets are in old Puxi.