Three Chinese cities, one missed connection, and a few things worth bringing back home

I have just come back from three weeks in China, in Guiyang, Beijing and Guangzhou. I was there through sport rather than through work, which turned out to be the better way to see a transport network. Nobody puts on a curated site visit for you. You just use the thing, like everybody else, at rush hour, with luggage, in the rain.

In my role we are given drivers and private cars, but I still prefer travelling on the metro or in Didis when I get a chance:)

I also got an unintended extra look at Guangzhou. My Beijing flight was delayed, my connection to Auckland was leaving 15 minutes after I landed, and I spent a genuinely memorable half hour finding out how fast a middle aged transport engineer can move through an airport.

I didn't make the flight - don't think I ever was going to even though off the plane first - and spent a memorable 24 hours in Guangzhou...China Southern looked after us though!

Here is what stuck with me.

Guiyang: they just built it

Guiyang is a mountain city of a few million people in Guizhou (in total eight million), one of China's less wealthy provinces. It is not a showcase city. Ten years ago it had no metro at all.

It now has four lines, 149 km of track and 93 stations. Line 1 opened in 2017, Line 2 in 2021, Line 3 in 2023 and the S1 line in 2024. A tram line is due in 2027.

Four lines in seven years, through hills, in a provincial city. It is insanely fast.

I am not pretending the delivery model transfers. It does not, and it comes with costs and trade-offs we would not accept and in some cases should not. But the contrast is worth naming. In that same seven years, plenty of Australian and New Zealand cities have been debating a single corridor. Not building it. Debating it.

The lesson I took is not about money or speed. It is that Guiyang built a network. Lines that cross, that go where people actually are, that make each other more useful. We tend to build one line, measure its patronage in isolation, and then wonder why it underperforms. A single line is a shuttle. Three lines is a system.

One thing that also stood out - the elevation - at 1250m it definitely felt harder to run and jog.

Beijing: the bike came back

Everyone knows the story of China trading bicycles for cars. What I did not expect was how thoroughly the bike has come back.

Beijing crossed a billion shared bike trips in 2023, running at roughly 3.12 million rides a day, up 9 percent on the year before. There are over a million shared bikes registered in the city and around 800,000 in the central area, split mostly between Meituan, HelloBike and Didi. Nationally, bike share now covers 460 cities.

The thing that stood out is the trip length. The average shared bike journey is about 1.5 km and eleven minutes.

That is not a bike replacing a car trip. That is a bike solving the last two kilometres to a metro station. Bike share in Beijing is not competing with the subway, it is feeding it, and the subway is the world's longest metro network at 909 km, 30 lines and 524 stations, carrying somewhere around 9.5 million people a day.

And crucially, it works because they rebuilt the infrastructure to carry it. Wide separated lanes. Physical kerbs, not paint. Beijing even built a dedicated bicycle expressway at Huilongguan, grade separated, no cars.

Every time bike share has struggled in an Australian or New Zealand city, the post mortem lands on operators, dockless clutter or vandalism. I would gently suggest the more likely answer is that we dropped bikes into cities with nowhere safe to ride them, and then blamed the bikes.

Guangzhou: the bus that thinks it is a train

The Guangzhou BRT is the one I would put in front of every transport minister in our part of the world.

It is 22.5 km long with 27 stations. It carries around a million passenger trips a day. At peak it moves 26,900 passengers per hour per direction, second in the world only to Bogotá's TransMilenio. Buses arrive roughly every ten seconds. The stations are up to 260 metres long, transfers in the same direction are free, and it plugs directly into a metro network of 780 km and nearly 400 stations.

A million trips a day. On a bus, on a road, on 22.5 km of corridor.

We spend a great deal of energy in Australia and New Zealand explaining that rapid transit is unaffordable. Guangzhou's answer is that a bus given genuine priority, real stations, level boarding, off board fare collection and a corridor nobody is allowed to drive a car down will do most of what light rail does, for a fraction of the capital cost.

The catch, and it is the whole catch, is the word genuine. Half a BRT is just a bus lane with better branding. Guangzhou took the road space. That is the decision, and it is a political one rather than an engineering one.

The part that isn't in the tourism books

I would be giving you a sales pitch rather than an observation if I stopped there.

The driving is aggressive. Merging is a negotiation rather than a rule. Gaps get taken, not offered. Pedestrian crossings are a suggestion in a way that took me several days to stop flinching at. It is high flow and low trust, and it works largely because everyone has agreed on the same unwritten rules and drives to them.

Here is the thing I keep thinking about. The reason that traffic culture does not produce carnage among people walking and cycling is not that the driving improves. It is that vulnerable users are physically separated from it. Kerbs, fences, dedicated lanes, grade separation. The system does not ask drivers to be careful. It assumes they will not be, and builds accordingly.

That is a genuinely uncomfortable lesson for us, because our safety approach still leans heavily on education, signage and expecting compliance.

The e-bike numbers make the point sharper. Chinese health data cited in the reporting around the 2025 regulatory overhaul suggested an e-bike rider was dying roughly every hour nationally, with five more injured. China responded with a rewritten national standard, GB 17761-2024, fully in force from December 2025. Motor cut out at 25 km/h with anti tampering protection, weight caps, flame retardant materials to deal with battery fires, better brakes, and a shorter saddle to discourage carrying an adult passenger.

Australia and New Zealand are scaling e-bikes, e-scooters and delivery riders very fast, with much lighter regulation and far less separated infrastructure. We have the chance to learn from that sequence rather than repeat it. Right now I do not think we are taking it.

What I would bring home

Some thoughts:

• Build the network, not the line. Individual corridors assessed in isolation will always look marginal. The value is in the connections.

• Take the road space. BRT works when it is genuinely rapid. If we are not willing to give it the lane, we should stop calling it rapid transit.

• Treat bike share as a feeder, and fund it that way. A 1.5 km trip to a station is the job. Build the safe 1.5 km first.

• Separate, do not educate. Assume the driving will not improve. Design as though it will not.

• Get ahead of micromobility safety. The regulation will come eventually. It is cheaper and kinder to write it before the injury data forces it.

Now, if anyone from China Southern is reading, I would still like a word about that 24 hour delay!!!

Till next time,

Andrew

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Transit Trends · Andrew Collings, KA Advisory. Read and comment on the original on LinkedIn.

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