Via @tomvanderbilt, a video of an excellent piece of Shared Space infrastructure on Kunming’s third(!) ring road:
I’ve written before on the wonderful driving habits of the newly motorised Chinese. While they don’t exactly have the concept of Shared Space*, they do have the related concept of might makes right of way, and it doesn’t matter to a Chinese car owner whether a bit of land is technically a bike track or a footway. Not surprisingly, there is a massive death rate on the roads there, to the extent that the driving test prepares you to manage massive traumatic injuries.
In some of the backstreets of the Hutong neighbourhoods, the motor car has been banned because its presence overwhelms all other activities in the narrow spaces.
This picture used to be my favourite illustration of the current Chinese approach to roads, but the video above has surpassed it.
* A nice introduction to Shared Space is given by David Arditti.
