Heavy traffic ahead: car culture accelerates

Environmental Health Perspectives, April, 2005 by Richard Dahl

But to characterize the Chinese government as being blind to the dangers of rapid motorization is inaccurate. In 2000, China banned leaded gasoline and adopted the Euro I emission standards that were enacted in Europe in the early 1990s for all new cars and trucks. Last year, the Chinese adopted the Euro II standards enacted in Europe in the mid-1990s. Some cities are going further. Walsh says that Beijing, for example, will soon require the Euro III standards, which were adopted in 2001 in Europe.

Meanwhile, China has created its first fuel economy standards for new cars, which go into effect in July 2005. In the United States, cars are required to achieve at least 27.2 miles per gallon (mpg) while SUVs and light trucks are counted under a different system (and different agency) and meet a far more lenient standard. In China, the new standards place an absolute floor on fuel economy for cars according to their weight class (there are 15 classes in China). The average weight of cars sold in China in 2003 was more than 3,000 pounds, large by developing country standards. The Chinese standards cannot prevent overall mileage from deteriorating if weight increases, Schipper says, but they may discourage manufacturers from making heavier cars that cannot meet

standards for their weight classes.

Schipper says that while the speed with which China has implemented fuel standards is laudable, even more noteworthy is the fact that China is aspiring to Western standards even though its economy, on a per capita basis, is still far from Western levels. "But the question is whether these measures will be swamped by the overall increase in motorization," he says. "And I don't have the answer to that."

Sperling says the escalation of motor vehicles in developing countries will only continue unless the governments in those countries intervene to halt--or at least slow down--the march to a U.S.-style transportation system featuring many personal vehicles. "The market forces are such that unless government intervenes, countries will follow that path because the elites buy the cars, the elites run the government and industry, so there's a lot of pressure to build more roads," he says. "It creates a spiral of more and more motorization, and it takes tremendous political leadership not to follow that path."

The Role of the Automakers

In 2004, a group of international automotive and energy companies known as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development issued a report called Mobility 2030." Meeting the Challenges to Sustainability, which detailed recommendations for achieving "sustainable mobility" on a global scale. The report defines sustainable mobility as the ability to meet the needs of society to move freely, gain access, communicate, trade, and establish relationships without sacrificing other essential human or ecological values today or in the future.

Martin Wachs, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, served as a reviewer on the project and came away from it struck by the sense of responsibility that the companies seem to hold toward auto growth in developing countries: "They acknowledged that worldwide adoption of the automobile is an environmental threat, and they are considering collectively what industries might do to create a sustainable transition to a more 'automobilized' world," he says.