Environmental Affairs

Lesson 5: Business, Industry and Transportation, all gasping for air

Background reading for the Exercise

Excerpt from URBAN TRANSPORT AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT: A DIFFERENT MODEL, Enrique Peñalosa -----------------------------

The unsustainable nature of the car-based transport is illustrated by the fact that the problem gets worse as societies grow richer. Unless car use is restricted severely, society will be worse instead of better with progress:

More traffic jams More noise More air pollution More health problems More low density city expansion and suburban development More regressive public expenditure on road building and maintenance that benefits primarily car-owning upper middle classes.

In a city where the poor do not use cars, road building and improvement in order to relieve congestion is very regressive. It takes up very scarce government resources leaving the poor needs unattended.

Car use in Third World cities is very regressive: It absorbs massive public investments for road infrastructure building and maintenance, taking resources away from the more urgent and important needs of the poor; creates jams that hinder the mobility of the bus riding majorities; pollutes the air; makes noise; road arteries primarily for private vehicle users become obstacles to lower income pedestrians; it leads to a progressive invasion of scarce pedestrian spaces by parked vehicles. There clearly are contradictory interests between motor vehicles and human beings: The more a city is made to accommodate motor vehicles, the less respectful of human dignity it becomes; and the more acute the differences in quality of life between upper income and lower income groups. Children, the old, handicapped and vulnerable populations are particularly alienated by increasing motorization and the processes that come with it.

Sr. Peñalosa and Harley Shaiken, Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies, enjoy the Berkeley campus public spaces. (photo by Hadas) International experience has made it clear that trying to solve traffic problems building more, bigger roads is like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. In the United States time lost in traffic increases every year, despite enormous highways. A new highway stimulates new development around it and particularly at its extremes and thus generates its own traffic. Let us imagine a new 10-lane highway from the center of a city to any location in its outskirts. Immediately after it is completed, or even before, new housing projects, shopping malls, factories, are built around the new road and in the countryside near its extreme. The new road stimulates urban expansion, lower densities and longer trips. Ten years after the road is built, traffic jams are just as bad as ever. But now average trips are longer. For traffic considerations, doubling the number of vehicles is the same as having the same amount of vehicles travel twice the distance.

For all the above, building new road infrastructure in order to solve traffic problems not only is regressive and dehumanizes a city, but it is also useless. To build more road infrastructure in order to solve traffic problems appears as logic and it is as wrong as lowering interest rates in order to lower inflation. Despite the overwhelming evidence that this is wrong, we continue to do it throughout the world.

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