How 2025 turned out
(midwest.social)
☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ to 
Memes
China's not living in the future. America just stopped building
I gotta say I think this photo is one of the worst ways one could have shown the advancements China has made. China's done a lot more than lil highway loopies, a bridge, and a ring shaped viewing platform
China is living in the future because they have highway intersections? I really don't get this meme. You can find large highway intersections in the US too and that doesn't make the US any better. Honestly I would say the opposite.
They've blended urban infrastructure with a bunch of green space, and that's certainly nice. Would be even better if that cloverleaf highway was a rail line instead.
But if the worst thing you can say about Chinese urbanism is "It could use a few more trains"... eh.
China is making rapid improvements in high speed rail. It would be nice if we could get that kind of motivation in other countries.
That photo is kinda depressing. Muddy river, a massive highway interchange, faceless skyscrapers and some smog to boot. Having been to China, it is full of places so much nicer than that.
Why is that depressing? I see mixed urban greenery with lots of city infrastructure.
Highways are awful city infrastructure. They are loud, polluting, dangerous, socially detrimental, and ugly. What if you have to get to other side of this river, or even just the other side of the highway? You probably need a car to do any of that.
Skyscrapers are a bad way to build a city. They exacerbate social inequality and generally require transportation for people to get to their jobs. Transportation which, it looks like, is limited to cars - there's not even a bus lane on the 5-lane highway full of traffic, so a bus will be slow as fuck.
This is basically the same as many north american cities, but with a more pronounced cloverleaf and a viewing platform to look at it.
Show me the metro lines connecting walkable neighborhoods. Or high-speed trains between well-developed city centers. Or any other good urbanism. China has it but for some reason photos aimed at the western audiences focus on "we built even more asphalt and concrete so that a highway looks slightly more interesting from afar".
Highways are not city infrastructure
Rivers get muddy after rain. The Missouri River has been called "Big Muddy" for centuries because it used to flood from snow pack melt from the Rockies every year.
China turned out smoggy?
