Nice so you don't have to floor it to make a yellow or Kickstart your air-cooled motorcycle when a long red turns green.
The timing is off by 3 seconds to stop people from going just before it turns green. So people go 4 seconds early.
So in China cities are unofficially ranked by tier. Tier 1 is Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, then theres like a couple dozen cities of 5-10m considered tier 2, Wuhan, Kunming, Xi'an, cities that are still very desirable in terms of economic development, tourism, education, etc. Tier 5 cities have less than a million people and even people from China might not know their names.
This one had half a million, and the housing situation was still quite good, inexpensive, quality high rises everywhere, the cheaper 5 story mixed use apartment streets seemed relatively well built, but it didn't even have direct passenger service connecting towns in the area, it was merely a stop on a high-speed line between other cities, to get to a town 100 miles away, you had to take a high-speed train to a town closer to a major city, then a low speed train in the direction you came from.
Here's some random pics, most of it looks like any of the other mundane parts of a chinese city.
