Greenfield Transit Development

Dan Chinoy hops a ride onto a newish Beijing subway line:

As we went farther north, the crowd slowly thinned, eventually leaving me sharing a car with a pair of giggling, stylish Chinese girls playing with their iPhones, a couple evidently going to a costume party — the guy in a pirate hat, the girl wearing rabbit ears — and several young men in Air Jordans and Nike jackets. Once we arrived, I followed the couple up the escalator from the platform, stepped outside — and into the rubble of what was apparently once a small, poor, rural village.

I had, I realized, arrived in the vast borderland between Beijing's urban center and its rural surroundings. The remnants of a farm were visible down the street, and a growing block of new high-rise apartments and cranes loomed jarringly in the distance. A brand new, almost empty highway implied expectations of greater things to come — expectations that perhaps also explained why it was necessary to put a rail station in a rural area underground.

This is, in principle, exactly what a growing city ought to do. When it comes to highways, people seem to get this. You don't wait for suburban homes and shopping centers to get all build and filled in and then say "we need a highway." Where would you put it? What you do is you build the highway in the expectation that the existence of infrastructure will make it an attractive place for development. Obviously it's possible to miscalculate with this decision, but it's also possible to get it right. Before cars existed, people also understood this. You build out the rail network first (that can be Upper Manhattan or it can be the Transcontinental Railroad) and then people start building structures at rail-appropriate density at the places the rail transit serves. Either way, a city expecting to grow needs to make some infrastructure plans. And the plans determine development patterns. A station in a former village outside of Beijing doesn't "need" to be underground, but if you build it underground then a certain sort of place can grow around it that wouldn't be feasible if you ran the trains in a highway median.