The third in a series of stories on China.
BEIJING -- Fueled by a booming economy, more than a thousand additional cars a day take to Beijing's ring roads and imperial grid.
China's second-largest city has more than 3 million automobiles, up a staggering sixfold from a decade ago.
More mobility means more freedom to visit the Great Wall or the Yellow Sea, but the onslaught of autos also means more congestion and pollution here. So as Beijing and other Chinese cities grow bigger and wealthier, urban planners say, the most pressing challenge is finding a way that cars, commerce and clean air can coexist.
Some want more roads, subways and buses. Others want more alternative-fuel vehicles and higher driving fees. Most agree that banning private cars won't work over the long term.
"This is much more complex than the young people having money to buy cars," said Lee Schipper, a veteran transportation analyst with the World Resources Institute. "This is about making a statement that China's made it."
China was known as the "Bicycle Kingdom" 30 years ago when the country's de facto leader, Deng Xiaoping, began sweeping economic reforms. The Communist country's real gross domestic product has grown at an average rate of almost 10 percent annually since then, putting the industrial revolution and automobile age on a collision course.
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| Beijing adds more than 1,000 automobiles a day, crowding major arterials such as Jianguomenwai Avenue (above) in the city's Chaoyang District. The view is from the 22nd floor of the Capital Tower -- the downtown office of General Motors Corp., China's top automaker. Photo by Michael Burnham. |
Peddlers with pushcarts plod alongside mopeds, buses and taxis during rush hour in Beijing. Sleek sedans honk and push pedestrians and bicycles aside. And the balance of wheels seems to change with each new fortune.
Automakers produced and sold a record 8.8 million vehicles last year, up 20 percent from 2006, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
China now ranks as the world's second-largest car market, behind the United States. But with four times the U.S. population, China will likely become the No. 1 auto producer and consumer within a decade, predicts David Chen, who heads up Beijing operations for General Motors Corp.
Last year, the Detroit-based company produced and sold 1 million cars in China for the first time, making GM China's top automaker, with a 12.8 percent share of the market.
Gazing from a downtown office tower, Chen mused about a time when a Beijinger had to book a taxi a week in advance and bicycles ruled the road. Then he pointed with pride at the line of autos inching past the building on one of Beijing's busiest arterials.
Gray smog shrouded distant hills.
"Mobility in this world is a trend that will continue," Chen said. "It's a driver of the economy and an engine of growth."
But how many drivers is too many in a city of 15 million people?
Beijingers could find out later this summer, when throngs of tourists touch down for the Olympics, predicts Rob Watson, a New York-based sustainable development consultant who worked in China for a decade with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Beijing's government announced last week that it will allow private vehicles on the megacity's roads on alternate days -- based on even and odd license plate numbers -- from July 20 to Sept. 20.
Watson still predicts gridlock.
There are too many choke points and too few subways and buses, he said. Modernization is happening too fast.
"These guys are amid raging waters of economic growth, but they've been piling rocks on their back as they try to swim," Watson said. "They've done things at a scope and speed that nobody's done before."
| Beijing airport terminal unfurled for Olympic traffic |
From above, Beijing Capital International Airport's newest terminal is a flying dragon with flashing gold scales -- bold, brash and big enough to welcome the world to the new China. Many of the tourists who come to Beijing this summer for the XXIX Olympiad will pass through Terminal 3 -- a structure twice the size of the Pentagon. Like the dragons sitting sentry at the Forbidden City, Terminal 3 is intended to symbolize China's power and culture. The terminal's soaring ceiling and walls change from red to yellow -- happiness to luck -- as people pass. The 1.3-million-square-meter structure has a massive footprint, but it is "unparalleled" in its environmental sustainability, claims the London-based architect, Foster + Partners. Doubling as dragon scales, the rooftop skylights are oriented to the southeast to maximize heat gain from the morning sun, according to the firm. Glazing on windows and an integrated environment-control system also help minimize energy consumption. A light-rail line linking the airport and downtown will open at the end of the month, according to state media. So, too, will a second highway. Terminal 3 opened in February after four years of construction. Foster + Partners, led by Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner Norman Foster, estimates that the building will be able to support 50 million passengers a year by 2020. The Beijing airport opened 60,000-square-meter Terminal 1 in 1980 as China began its market-based economic reforms. The airport opened 336,000-square-meter Terminal 2 just nine years ago to handle another 26 million annual passengers. The latest growth spurt still might not be enough. China's civil aviation authority announced last winter that Beijing would need a second airport by 2015 to accommodate growing travel. -- Michael Burnham |
Last August, Beijing temporarily banned the use of about 1.3 million private and government automobiles -- excluding taxis, buses and emergency vehicles -- to test the impact on congestion, pollution and public transit use.
In a government survey taken just after the four-day purge, 89 percent of respondents said traffic improved "remarkably" during the test, state media reported. However, about as many people said more traffic-control measures would be needed to ease congestion before the Olympics.
Ordering cars off the roads won't work over the long term -- especially as China revs up its market-based reforms, contends Ping He, president of the International Fund for China's Environment, a nongovernmental organization with U.S. and China offices.
"Once people have a car, they will drive it," Ping said.
And the government, which has dubbed the automobile industry an official "pillar" of economic development, is not likely to limit who can buy a car, Ping and others contend.
"The old way of China is to say, 'You can't do this, you can't do that,'" said Hanling Yang, an analyst with the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, which conducts training for land-use planners. "Maybe the new way is to enforce higher driver fees."
Six years ago, Shanghai began auctioning license plates monthly to cut down on traffic. The state-run Xinhua News Agency reported last September that the city issued 8,000 license plates for an average price of about $7,000 -- more than the price of a small car.
The policy appears to be working. Shanghai is mainland China's biggest and most Westernized city, but it has just a quarter as many automobiles as Beijing.
Ping suggested that the capital city also try auctioning license plates to rein in car growth to about 5 percent annually. That won't be easy, he conceded.
Beijing added 120,000 cars in the first quarter, up more than 13 percent from the year-earlier period, the city's Traffic Management Bureau reported. In advance of the Olympics, the bureau has set up a real-time traffic map online to help manage flow.
Even at midnight, the map often flashes red with traffic jams within the city's central ring roads.
Beijing might already be too sprawling for "congestion pricing," in which drivers are charged tolls to enter the urban core when traffic is heaviest, suggested Schipper, the World Resources Institute transportation analyst. The island city-state of Singapore pioneered the concept three decades ago.
Such a system might work best in Xi'an, one of central China's largest and most prosperous cities, Schipper offered. The heart of the city is surrounded by a massive wall and gates, which date back to the Qing and Ming dynasties.
With few roads punched through the wall, pedestrians, bicycles and motorcycles still outnumber automobiles.
In Beijing and other places where the car is king, traffic solutions should include tolls on skyways, higher parking fees and weight-based fuel-economy standards, Schipper suggested.
"Beijing is gridlock, and I'd give Shanghai five more years," Schipper said. "No place has ever built itself out of gridlock -- anywhere."
That isn't stopping China's big cities from trying.
Beijing's development plan for 2006-2010 calls for the expansion of the urban highway network to more than 280 kilometers, including three "fast ring roads" and 14 "radiating fast roads." The plan also calls for expanding Beijing's public transit rail network to more than 270 kilometers.
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| Xi'an's wall, pictured from the Shuyuan Gate, still forms an imposing barrier around the city core. Just a handful of roads link the downtown core with the rest of the city, making the Shaanxi Province capital a good candidate for automobile congestion pricing, some transportation analysts say. Photo by Michael Burnham. |
The city's successful bid for the Olympics has accelerated the efforts, concluded a United Nations Environment Programme audit of Beijing's preparations for the "green" games.
Beijing has installed 16 kilometers of bus rapid-transit lines, giving the system a total passenger capacity of 100,000 people per day, according to the audit. At least 4,000 of the city's public buses now run on compressed natural gas.
The city has 142 miles of track for rail commuters and plans to more than double that amount by 2010, central Ministry of Environmental Protection officials wrote in an e-mail response to Greenwire's questions.
"Beijing is still a city in the process of construction, the economy and society is growing very fast, and the population is also growing rapidly," ministry officials added. "The infrastructure is relatively weak. There is a great environmental challenge in the development of the city."
One challenge in particular is getting people to ride the bus or subway.
Beijing's public ground transportation capacity is about 19 million passengers a day, yet just 8.5 million passengers use it, noted UNEP officials, who attributed the gap in part to the city's rapid road construction (see Part 1 of this series).
Beijing officials are scouring the world for solutions.
Officials with the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development brought Chinese officials to Portland, Ore., last year to learn how the urban area's growth boundary spurs multimodal transit and dense development. Portland's Metro planning agency, which has jurisdiction over three counties and 25 cities, operates similarly to Beijing, explained Connie Ozawa, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University.
"It's a huge challenge to not stifle individual choice but to also make alternatives appealing that may not include an automobile," Ozawa said. "Things have been done a little bit differently in Portland, and we want to expose these concepts to the folks in China."
No matter how many subway lines and bus-friendly boroughs China builds, its cities still must grapple with air pollution.
A 2005 study by the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute listed vehicles as China's top source of urban air pollution. Vehicles contribute 45-70 percent of nitrogen oxide emissions and 50-80 percent of carbon oxide emissions in Chinese cities, the study noted.
GM officials say the solution again comes back to consumer choice.
GM's Chairman and Chief Executive Rick Wagoner announced in April that the automaker would introduce more than 16 hybrid vehicles in China during the next four years. Shanghai GM, a 50-50 joint venture with Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., also plans this summer to test the Chevrolet Volt, a compact car that can be configured to run on electricity, gasoline, ethanol or biodiesel.
Longer-term, GM plans to offer vehicles in China that would run on hydrogen fuel cells, Beijing general manager Chen explained. The company is also financially backing the Chicago-based startup Coskata Inc., which is researching ways to make fuel from municipal solid waste and other carbonaceous materials.
"It's not sustainable just to use petroleum," said Chen, whose country hiked retail petrol and diesel prices as much as 18 percent last week to slow surging domestic oil consumption.
China accounted for almost half of the growth in world oil demand last year. Automobiles consumed about a third of China's oil.
But with a barrel of crude trading for more than $130 today, the would-be No. 1 auto market must be creative tomorrow, Chen and others contend.
"There is the potential for China to leapfrog," said transportation analyst Yang.
Click here for a statistical snapshot of China.
