Shenzhen Street details

cars, walking, biking, people. How it all fits together--or not. See also www.szurban.tumblr.com.

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Hygiene

Shenzhen has many of these neighborhood-level trash stations, where trash collected by the street sweepers is consolidate to be carried away in trucks. They smell--especially in the summer-- and provide a slipper experience if someone were to actually walk on the sidewalk near them. Shenzhen has taken steps to make these stations less of an eye sore and smell factory through newer designs, better equipment and better cleaning protocols.

I forget where this photo was taken. Photo from 5 years ago. 

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Forget about using the ramp, a car is parked at the ramp. Poor attention to detail means no bollards protect the ramp from parked cars.

Fumin Road, Futian.

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Outside a neighborhood police station. Police cars park on the sidewalk, so police officers park there too. Since no one knows which is a police officer's car and which is not, it ends up that everyone parks on the sidewalk.

Zhenxing Road, near Huaqiang bei in Futian.

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Overly wide but empty streets make great places to 'burn rubber'.

Xiangmihu, Futian

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Vacant land means walls that push out the pedestrian. In this photo, construction is actually occurring. However, there are many instances where a site is bought and immediately walls are put up that encroach upon the sidewalk and construction does not occur until years later. Chinese cities are cities of walls--even in downtown areas. As a result it is impossible for the pedestrian to make a shortcut through a typical city mega-block.

The last building has been uncompleted and empty for more than 10 years.

Chegongmiao, north of Shennan Blvd, near Donghai Hua Yuan.

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Neighborhood amenities disappear. This is deep inside an old Shenzhen neighborhood filled with work-unit housing--right outside the public kindergarten. Fortunately the speeds are slow here because, with all the cars parked on the sidewalk, it is impossible to walk on the sidewalk. At right, what is now a small parking lot, used to be a relaxing area for people in the neighborhood.

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This is supposed to be a bus stop. But it has been taken over by the parked car. So people wait for the bus on the busy street.

This is why new street design manuals in other countries advocate bus stop bulb-outs, not bus stop indentations like we have in Shenzhen.

Coco Park, Futian.

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Where the sidewalk ends, there is a fence, and another fence, and the pedestrian needs to hop over both.

Luohu at Sunggang road and Honghu road.

(BTW, Where the Sidewalk Ends is the name of a well-known children's book in the US by the multi-talented Shel Silverstein.)

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This is a parked car. I know that from its position on the crosswalk and blocking half of a narrow street it must be moving. But, no, it is parked.

Futian CBD, south of Shennan Boulevard

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Parking everywhere: Parking on the side of the main road, parking on the side of the frontage road, parking on the sidewalk, parking on the 'plaza' in front of the Laurel restaurant. Xiangmihu, Futian.

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Entrances to apartment complexes made only for the car, so the pedestrian has to walk under the gate.

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Bagualing, Futian. What will be a common theme: sidewalk becomes parking lot. The only aspect that makes this unusual is that it is two rows of cars rather than just one.