Heavy traffic ahead: car culture accelerates

Environmental Health Perspectives, April, 2005 by Richard Dahl

The impact of increased motorization on Chinese urban air quality is still difficult to determine, Walsh says. Chinese cities have tended to have poor air quality for years, so the appearance of more motor vehicles isn't exactly creating a new pollution problem. Instead, he says, Chinese cities are undergoing a shift from industrial pollution to motor vehicle pollution. At the same time that motor vehicles have begun to clog city thoroughfares, industry has been moving out to urban peripheries. This shift means that sulfur dioxide levels have been going down in Chinese city air, but they are being replaced by vehicle emissions including carbon monoxide and ozone-forming nitrogen oxides.

While China has greatly tightened requirements for new vehicles, the older cars on the nation's roadways create serious pollution problems. According to the Energy Foundation, a partnership of Chinese and U.S. foundations interested in sustainable energy, recent testing shows that emission levels of Chinese autos are similar to those of cars used in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s; these cars emit 10-20 times more pollution than cars currently used in Western countries. According to the foundation, 40% of autos and 70% of taxis in Beijing fail to meet the most basic Western emission standards.

Increased motorization in the developing world is having social and cultural impacts on poorer societies as well. At the same time that people from rural areas continue to flood into already densely populated cities to find jobs, people whose incomes have risen to the point where they can buy cars are fleeing to the cities' outskirts in a manner not unlike the suburbanization of American cities following World War II. The upper middle class in China already sees the car as a way to provide them more mobility, says Lee Schipper, director of research at the World Resources Institute's Center for Transport and the Environment (EMBARQ) in Washington, D.C. "But the resulting congestion when [just] twenty percent of the daily journeys are in cars--the case in Mexico City or Sao Paulo today--means that nobody has more mobility."

"It's not that cars and two-wheelers are bad," Schipper adds. "The problem is that they're being put on the crowded streets so fast, everywhere, and authorities aren't doing anything about it. There are too many of them, too soon. You can't keep up." In addition to rising air pollution, the glut of traffic means accident rates are high, with pedestrians and cyclists the most common victims. [For more information on the growing problem of traffic-related fatalities, see "Vehicular Manslaughter: The Global Epidemic of Traffic Deaths," EHP 112:A628-A631 (2004).]

Gakenheimer notes a further pernicious effect on the individual. Public transit is the form of transportation most impacted by congestion; autos can take circuitous routes or select more accessible destinations, whereas city buses are confined to predetermined routes. And the greater the congestion, the more tempting it is to get a car. So there is what he calls a "tragedy of the commons" effect.