Heavy traffic ahead: car culture accelerates

Environmental Health Perspectives, April, 2005 by Richard Dahl

The island nation of Singapore has made auto ownership prohibitively expensive through the imposition of various fees, including one that must be paid just to enter an auction for a limited number of auto stickers. People who win the stickers at auction must then pay for the vehicle itself. Singapore also has an extensive public transportation system that provides access to almost everywhere on the island.

Bogota, Colombia, has built an extremely successful bus rapid transit (BRT) system, Transmilenio, which employs large, modern buses on a dedicated thoroughfare that cuts directly through the middle of the city. According to Schipper, 5-10% of Transmilenio's passengers are former auto users--a huge number in any new public transit system, he says.

The success of Bogota's BRT system and an earlier one, the pioneering BRT system in Curitiba, Brazil, in the 1970s, has drawn significant attention around the world, including the developed world. Cities that have adopted such systems include Kunming, Delhi, Los Angeles, Dublin, Paris, and most large cities in Latin America. Shanghai is currently building a BRT system and an extensive subway system with help in part from EMBARQ. And Shanghai has long imposed disincentives and restrictions on auto use, such as stiff registration fees.

Still another tactic being contemplated to reduce auto congestion in developing countries actually originated in the developed world, in the city of London, England, which pioneered the concept of "congestion pricing." In 2003, London initiated a congestion-pricing program in which drivers had to pay a fee of 5 [pounds sterling] (about US$8) to cross a clearly marked boundary in the center city. The effect has been reduced congestion and increased public transit ridership. The fee will rise soon, says Schipper, and the area where it is payable will expand.

Luis Gutierrez, who oversees EMBARQ's Latin American programs, says he has been talking about a congestion pricing program with officials in Sao Paolo, one of three Latin American cities in which EMBARQ is working to create public--private partnerships for sustainable transportation. "These kinds of policies are very simple for people to understand," he says. "You have limited public space and a lot of demand."

He says the idea enjoys growing public support, and city officials like it, too, because it could provide an additional source of revenue. There's just one problem, he says: the people who own the cars--and who want to drive anywhere for as little cost as possible--are middle class, and the middle is politically powerful.

Gutierrez also says the idea of BRT systems modeled after Bogota has become extremely popular. In 10 years, he says, Latin America will have 99 cities with populations of at least 750,000 and a total of 8,000 kilometers of heavily traveled corridors suitable for BRT systems.

Gutierrez says the problem of rapidly increasing motorization is the same everywhere, and that governments in Latin America are responding to privately owned cars in much the same way that Asian governments are. They see them as contributors to economic development--or at least as a sign of it.