Public Transportation...

Two weeks before the start of the Olympics, Beijing has debuted what will be one of the Games most significant legacies, bigger than all the impressive architecture and the beautification campaigns: three new subways that expand the city's track length by twenty five percent. As US urban and commuter rail is just barely chugging along, the new lines are stand-outs: fast, gorgeous and frequent, arriving every two and a half minutes at rush hour -- things that cannot easily be said about most American subways. The ticket price hasn't gone up either: it's still 2 RMB or about 30 cents (...