After more than a year of excellent operation and serving me well, it's time to sell off the Yamaha YBR-125cc bike. If all goes well, I'll get 4500 RMB for it, that is half the purchase price, but will settle at 4000 RMB no lower. For an unregistered motorcycle, this is a fair price, and the buyers would surely be made aware of the risks.
The last few days of test-commuting from my new house in the semi-suburbs (Minhang District to be exact, near the Lianhua Lu Carrefour) have revealed an interesting fact:
Line #1 trumps the motorcycle.
Of all subway lines in Shanghai, this particular line is the most efficient which makes sense as it's also the most heavily used.
That fact, however, only applies for direct runs to/from downtown without any subway transfers. If a subway transfer is involved, say interchanging to Line #4 in order to get to work, then the motorcycle wins out again.
As mentioned before in this blog, subway transfers in Shanghai are not convenient as you have to walk long distances and the system is not designed to facilitate timed transfers. In other words, the probability of *missing* the next train increases if you've just gotten off the first one, which explains why locals bolt from the doors and run if they're trying to make a connection. It gives a whole new meaning to the word RUSH HOUR which applies in a very LITERAL sense!!!
Even so, line #1 from my new place to downtown takes 20-25 minutes which is far better than the 45 minutes it would otherwise take on a bike during heavy traffic.
Unexpectedly, even with the transfer, the test commute using a line #1 and #4 combination to get to work from my new place was more efficient than I had realized.
Here are the results so far during rush hour.
BIKE:
Old house --> 5 to 10 minutes.
New house --> 15-20 minutes, all depending on the traffic lights and congestion.
SUBWAY:
Old house --> 25-30 minutes. 15 minute walk to the station during a convoluted maze, maximum 5 minutes wait for the train, 5 minutes train ride, 5 minutes walk to school.
New house --> 28-35 minutes. 3 minutes walk to the station on a direct route, maximum 3 minutes wait for the train, 12 minutes to the transfer station, 2 minutes to transfer, 5 minutes max wait for line #4, 5 minutes max wait on next train, 5 minutes walk to school.
The shocking thing here is that the range for the two subway commutes OVERLAP each other, but the distances are substantially different. As mentioned in another post, the new house is 10km away from work, whereas the old house is only 2.5km away.
In other words, the old house gives a disgustingly low average speed of 5-6 km/h by taking the subway. You can correctly reason from here that yes indeed, you would be better off walking the whole thing. The new house using the subway gives a more reasonable average speed of about 20 km/h
As a point in comparison, the bike does about 25-35 km/h average speed, depending mainly on the route.
The fact that the subway is efficient now makes it a worthwhile option, especially for rainy days.
The main reason for the substantial increase in efficiency in the subway is that I'm actually living close to a station now, and now the time is spent riding the subway as opposed to walking to the station (as from the downtown house)
Another shocking thing is that while the commute times haven't increased significantly, the house rental prices have dropped by nearly half.
This leads me to another rant about how I feel I got cheated with the downtown house, in hindsight, when they said at the beginning, oh yeah it's close to subway station. And now, they could feel justified in raising the rent to nearly 6500 RMB a month. I'm also rather pissed off at how the rental situation was handled by my school secretary and how I'm being grifted off a tax fee, but that's another post that will have to wait.
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