The area right off of the park has a pretty wide road, but the further east you go, they get a bit narrower. I'm mostly talking about the area between there and the Xinan Jiao subway stop. The roads are still wider than what you'll see by Chifeng Dao, but the blocks are much smaller than many other "new" areas of the city.


I'd like to add that those big wide roads can be very inefficient, as well. There seems to be this idea going around in Tianjin, and perhaps even more so in Beijing, that in order to move traffic you need big, wide, arterial roads, and little else. You do need some of them, of course, but when the whole system is based on them it becomes easier to get bogged down. If a major artery gets blocked, (and that does seem to happen on more than just a passing occasion), it backs up the whole system because you have nowhere else to route people. If you sacrificed some of those big, wide boulevards for more of an urban street-grid, you'd be able to keep traffic flowing a bit more smoothly during those crunch times when someone's car gets rear-ended and they decide they need to stop in the middle of the street to argue about it for half an hour.

 They said that in Shanghai too - but now we have 24hour traffic jams. Even in Pudong withthe widest roads I have friends who have had to move closer to their work because their commute has gotten longer and longer over the past 5 years. We get 8,000 new cars a month here as so many middle class Chinese want to own one and now can.
The same thing WILL happen in Tianjin and TEDA and any planning solution has to take that into account. Its a tricky one as the only precedents are in China itself, Beijing, Shenzhen and Shanghai and clearly those places got it wrong. As I mentioned before there is definitely a phd, a book and possibly a Nobel Prize for the person who can solve it and, more importantly, persuade China's second and third tier cities to adopt it rather than just listening to whichever developer walks in the door with the fattest cheque.
Sorry, rant finished. I didn't get my coffee this morning 

I have now reheated and drunk the few sips of yesterday's coffee that was in my vacuum mug that I left in the office yesterday. Its the only one I have with a snap-shut lid so the only one I can take to work on my bike
Sadly, banning cars doesn't work either. It's been proven that the best walkable streets are those that attract business and they tend to be in the city center. banning cars actually discourages people to go there. Look at Las Ramblas in Madrisd or the Champs Elysees in Paris - both extremely walkable streets because they are in mixed use areas with car access. In fact Champs Elysees is a major auto route AND one of the best walkable streets in the world because of its layout and the range of businesses it can attract. Putting cars underneath is being tried in Boston (its called The Big Dig) and here in Shanghai they are about to put a car tunnel under The Bund. Both are too soon to say if they work. China's problems in this area are pretty unique because of its size, population and the pace of development. Nobody has really come up with a solution yet that can be accepted and acted on by the city officials who make the final decisions.

Actually, I believe Tianjin does have a limit on the number of people who they want to allow to live in the municipality. I think it was something like 13 million by a certain year, and they wanted to cap it at around there, because they didn't want to use up too much farmland. Anyone else read this?

right... so... some kind of steeper limits should be set.... and as far as the limit on the whole municipality thing, I think that's a little bit unspecific, because, obviously, the municipality is a large area, and there can be very high concentrations in some areas and low concentrations of people in others... I do honestly think it might be a wise idea to set specific limits for each block, or smaller areas. Either that or set limits on the number and height of residential buildings per area... something that would keep any particular area from becoming over-crowded.

South Korea and Japan have very high car ownership levels alongside very high population densities (higher than China; similar to the Hebei/BJ/TJ area). The difference is vastly better law enforcement, much more intelligent traffic management and cities that usually evolve rather than attempt huge, rapid "facelifts". Thye certainly have traffic problems, but Tianjin has those problems with less than 10% car ownership.

Absolutely. You'd think that planning a city from a blank slate would be easy. In fact there are so many factors that make up a living, human community that evolve differently in any one location over time it is impossible to predict and plan for them all. Without organic growth (a sort of "natural selection") making some of the choices for you, mistakes are bound to be made.