One of the main impediments to China meeting its pollution containment/reduction targets will be the hundreds of millions of private cars which will flood its roads over the next couple of decades. Outright stopping them would seem to run against the stated intention of the goverment to shift its development profile to a market basis. Also irrespective of the standard of a countrys or citys public transport, a lot of people, anywhere, will want a car as soon as they can afford one or nearly afford one. Its probably inadvisable to seriously to derail... deroad... that intention. A more practicable response would be to seek to limit the actual usage of those vehicles. In doing that, the carrot, obviously, would be in improving public transport. China was doing that last time I looked, e.g. aiming to raise the number of urban metros from five, about a decade ago, to thirty-two by about now, and to expand some of those to networks of hundreds of stations capacity. However, some of the stick would also fit in with a market-oriented agenda. The most obvious instrument available here would be petrol pricing. I havent visited China for a few years, and have never driven while there, but I have an idea from somewhere that petrol in China retails for much less than it does in many countries. International price parity would be the go, I would have thought. Of course, there would be resistance from the motoring lobby, and the motoring lobby no doubt includes a vastly disprortionate representation from deputies to the Peoples Congress and from Party members in general, as well as every kind of bureaucrat and trough snouter. I dont say it would be easy to enact, I just mention what would appear to be a rational measure. Along the same lines, some attention might be paid to rebalancing different road users priority of passage. Some years ago, I can recall regularly catching either bus 66 or 14 from the city to South Beijing. In the late afternoon, it would typically take 25 minutes to travel two stops south to Yang Qiao; you could easily walk there faster. That was of course caused by car traffic. Why should private cars, averaging about 1.2 persons/vehicle, be allowed to impede public vehicles packed with about 100 people each? Clearing a lane for the buses would impede the cars initially, but as that made bus routes faster and more reliable, their inherent advantage in urban conditions would attract more passengers, therby reducing the number of cars jamming the other lanes.
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 08:25:03 +0000
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