Heavy traffic ahead: car culture accelerates

Environmental Health Perspectives, April, 2005 by Richard Dahl

The effects of motorization on public transit was one of the topics covered in an article by Sperling and Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, published in the spring 2004 issue of Access magazine. They pointed out that increased motorization also includes an explosion in two-wheel motorized vehicles in many countries, pulling riders and revenue away from public-transit systems (and, Schipper notes, clogging the streets in Asia the way cars and mini-buses do in Latin America). As a result, wrote Claussen and Sperling, "In nearly all cities worldwide, public transit is losing market share."

The outcome in poor, densely populated cities with limited roadways for motor vehicles has been "far worse traffic congestion and pollution than exist in the United States," wrote Sperling and Claussen, despite the fact that these cities have a fraction of the car ownership of the United States. They pointed out that the challenge of building roadways is more than just a question of economics and financing. "Only a small minority of people in the developing world own cars and benefit from massive road-building budgets," they wrote. "In contrast, the vast majority suffer from increasing traffic congestion, noise, and pollution." Perhaps worse, says Gakenheimer, is that this majority suffers from the separation of destinations available only to auto users--a general fragmentation of society and destination opportunities.

The Governmental Influence

In China, a bastion of orthodox socialism not that long ago, the transition is especially jarring. In the old, purely socialist days, says Gakenheimer, the emphasis was on clustering workers, jobs, and services closely together. People lived close to their work, with commercial and business services nearby. But with the liberalization of the land market since the 1980s, that all changed.

For example, Gakenheimer says, people realized that making bicycles in the commercial center of the city had become a poor use of land, so they moved those facilities to urban peripheries where land was cheaper and they'd have more room. Then they sold the former space to buyers who used it for commercial and office use more district. "What this does is enormously increase the journey to work of the bicycle makers and also tends to create a central business district where there really wasn't one before," he says. "And the new central business district creates enormous radial commuting trip requirements."

Another factor accelerating the pace of urban decentralization in China, Gakenheimer says, is the fact that private land ownership doesn't exist there. Land in China is owned either by the state or by collectives, and the government has constitutionally backed power to "requisition" any land whenever it sees fit. As a result, Gakenheimer says, the suburbia that characterizes the United States is sprouting quickly in China. And as the new China begins to resemble the United States and Europe in many ways, its leaders perceive the private motor vehicle as an integral commodity. Moreover, he says, Chinese cities collect the revenue from urbanization only at the beginning of long leases. As a result, they must continue to induce urbanization to have a continual revenue stream.