The Madness Continues
Day 10 on the Beijing-Tibet Highway, and counting. According to the Wall Street Journal:
As the jam on the highway, also known as National Highway 110, passed the 10-day mark Tuesday, local authorities dispatched hundreds of police to keep order and to reroute cars and trucks carrying essential supplies, such as food or flammables, around the main bottleneck. There, vehicles were inching along little more than a third of a mile a day.
Zhang Minghai, director of Zhangjiakou city’s Traffic Management Bureau general office, said in a telephone interview he didn’t expect the situation to return to normal until around Sept. 17 when road construction is scheduled to be finished and traffic lanes will open up.
Okay, so this epic jam is the consequence of road construction. But here’s the kicker:
The mega-jam on the city outskirts comes as officials warn that downtown traffic in Beijing is steadily worsening. State media on Tuesday reported that average driving speeds in the capital could drop below nine miles an hour if residents keep buying at current rates of 2,000 new cars a day.
I remember thinking, when stories were coming out of China about how they were eliminating bike lanes and discouraging cycling, that they were very likely getting a lot of bad advice from Western consultants.
One could literally do the calculations on the back of an envelope to show that there was no way they could accommodate an unlimited number of vehicles – and yet they were trying to convert to Motordom as fast as possible. No doubt thinking they could build more roads to handle the demand.
Now what?
Longer term, city planners are pinning their hopes on expanded mass transit, adding subway, light rail and mode dedicated bus lanes.
But, evidently, there will be no contraints on auto production:
Automobile sales in China whizzed past the U.S. for the first time last year, as Chinese bought 13.6 million vehicles, compared with 9.4 million vehicles in 2008.
That way lies madness.
If the Chinese eventually do live as they say they want to like the USA and every Chinese like American has two cars heres the math on that 1,339,098,000 x 2 = 2,678,196,000 cars I swear the world will end soon. Not to mention all the cars in India and the rest of the worlds developing countries and yet there are people still saying peak oil is a myth oh what lies for people in the future I don’t even want to imagine.
Gordon, Jim, … you tell’em.
The car ownership numbers in the US are around .75 per capita, rather than 2 per capita. Still the highest in the world, and still totally disastrous if replicated by China. (I’m not sure another billion cars is much better than another 2 billion cars!) At the current rate it should take another 70 years or so for them to catch up to US car ownership per capita.
David don’t forget about the other big country which is also developing really fast AKA india with its 1,139,964,932 population that also is build and buying cars at a astronomical rate every time I read these articles all I can think of is god help us all with this wave of new car owners. there are other countries as well but China and India are the proverbial elephants in the room.
I realize that ‘Motordom’ is part of China’s economic development strategy but the lost productivity, not to mention ecological and health costs, of everyone in cars is staggering. It does seem that the Chinese have realized that this strategy is unsustainable though, at least from a congestion perspective. An article written in the Guardian in January reports that:
“After wrestling for years with Beijing’s appalling traffic and pollution problems, city planners have come up with a distinctly old-fashioned solution: bicycles.
Municipal officials want to boost the number of cyclists by 25% during the next five-year plan, state media reported today. Twenty years ago, four out of five residents in the Chinese capital pedalled to work through one of the world’s best systems of bicycle lanes. But the modern passion for cars has made two-wheeled transport so treacherous, dirty and unfashionable that barely a fifth of the population dares to use lanes that are now routinely blocked by parked cars and invaded by vehicles attempting to escape from the jams on the main roads.”
But the article also notes:
“This is not the first time Beijing has promised to regain its reputation as the “Kingdom of Bicycles”. Four years ago, the construction ministry announced that any bike lanes that had been narrowed or destroyed to make way for cars must be returned to their original glory. Civil servants were also encouraged to cycle to work or take public transport. Since then, however, the number of cars in Beijing has increased by more than 25% to pass the 4m mark, while there has been no obvious improvement in conditions for cyclists.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/24/beijing-cycling-capital-plans