Putting the city first
(Shanghai Star)
Updated: 2003-12-19 08:44

One aspect of Shanghai's surging development that looks increasingly likely to end in tears is its mad passion for the private automobile. Not that Shanghai is alone in this.

All of China's most rapidly emerging urban centres show signs of starry-eyed infatuation with the family car, which has been taken to people's hearts as a symbol of achieved prosperity, independence and freedom. Indeed, such a phenomenon is nothing but the Chinese version of a world-wide consumer dream, one that made the internal combustion engine the undisputed economic hub of 20th century industrialism, with petroleum as the world's most precious and destabilizing resource.

There are reasons to doubt whether the 21st century can proceed in the same way, although this has little to do with the "resource constraints" beloved of environmental activists. Markets and technology will continue to ensure that petroleum remains reasonably abundant, certainly until hydrogen fuel-cells become available (within a decade or so). These developments will also make cars much cleaner, with zero-emissions vehicles already on the drawing board.

The true problem with cars is a problem for cities, as urban centres as varied as London, Mexico City and Bangkok are already discovering. Whilst the diffuse urban sprawls of North America, from Los Angeles to Toronto, are able to develop alongside the car in a relationship of mutual dependency, the intense urbanizations more typical of the world's international metropolises (whether New York, Amsterdam, Hong Kong or Shanghai) are basically incompatible with large-scale intra-city car usage.

"Automobile cities" (exemplified by Los Angeles) typically consist of vast suburban expanses with only vague and indistinct downtown areas. Because they are not compact, they lack real urban character and only rarely inspire great affection. In fact, they are almost uninhabitable from the pedestrian point of view, with journeys between work, schools and shops requiring continuous usage of private motor vehicles. For these cities, mass car-ownership is not only feasible, it is essential.

Shanghai is, of course, nothing at all like this. It is a dense city with distinct urban cores, practical and delightful to traverse on foot. This compact intensity not only gives it character and vitality, but has enabled it to grow into a stunningly beautiful metropolis, loved by its denizens and visitors in the way New York or Hong Kong (fellow intense pedestrian cities) are loved. No one will ever feel this way about Los Angeles, or any such motor city.

Yet what Shanghainese - like New Yorkers - inevitably hate is the traffic. Intense metropolises are too dense to digest mass car ownership, so they clog up, their roads become dysfunctional, taxi and bus journeys become increasingly unpleasant, cyclists disappear, and eventually it is realized (as in London and Bangkok) that a choice has to be made between the city and its cars. When it comes to practically controlling automobile infestation, draconian road-pricing schemes combined with the continuous upgrading of mass-transit systems work best. So side with the city against its private motor vehicles: Shanghai's worth it.

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