News Articles, 1995-1997
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Cars, Cars, Cars

Last summer, Thailand's deputy prime minister proposed banning new cars in Bangkok from next year until 2001: this in a country that has set itself up to be the center of automobile production in Southeast Asia.

That may be an unusually desperate move, but it reflects widespread woes.

In Japan, a new beltway planned for Tokyo is on hold because of an unprecedented outbreak of citizen dissent. Surging public opposition has brought road-building almost to a halt in Britain, not for selected roads, but nationwide.

In California, the Bank of America together with citizens' groups and a state agency, has called for an about face away from auto-dependent suburban development. "Unchecked sprawl," its report finds, "has shifted from an engine of California's growth to a force that threatens to inhibit growth and degrade our quality of life." The message and the data to support it have been around for years, but coming from the state's largest bank and beneficiary of real estate development have had a wholly new impact.

All this explains why the Economist chose to celebrate this year's 100th birthday of the world's largest manufacturing industry with a section titled "Taming the Beast." In its words, "The product that has so strongly shaped the urban world we live in, and brought such wealth and such pleasure, is now seen by many as . . . a blessing turning into a curse."

For years, economists and environmentalists have been pointing to high costs associated with auto reliance that are borne (though not always paid for) by all of society. Among the direct ones are parking subsidies, roads and services worth more than $100 billion annually above what drivers pay in taxes and other fees. Losses not reflected in market transactions include those resulting from congestion, air pollution, noise, accidents and securing the flow of oil.

Conservative estimates put the sum of all these in the neighborhood of 5 percent of GDP for the United States and slightly less for Europe. But even that doesn't capture the costs of sprawl -- low-density development that depends on the automobile and can only be served by it.

In a now familiar sequence, developers reach for the cheapest land, out in the cow pastures. Government is left to fill in behind with brand new infrastructure -- roads, sewerage systems and schools -- paid for in part by those whose existing roads and schools are left to decline. Property values rise in a ring that marches steadily outward from the city and fall in older suburbs inside the moving edge.

Because residential development can't meet the public bills, local governments compete for commercial investment with tax discounts that deplete their revenues still further. Property taxes then rise, providing an incentive for new development.

Years of such leap-frogging construction devours land at an astonishing pace. New York and Chicago have grown 12 times as fast in area as in population for decades. Unbelievable as it may seem, only 45 years ago Los Angeles was the top-producing farm county in the United States. Today, 70 percent of its land is devoted to cars.

The same fate is in store for California's Central Valley, the country's richest agricultural area, unless policies change, says the American Farmland Trust. It projects annual losses resulting from urban sprawl of $3 billion in agricultural sales and local government deficits of $1 billion. A more compact growth pattern would halve the losses and turn the deficits into small surpluses.

There are more subtle costs, as well. The automobile is unquestionably a blessing, but there is a price to be paid for suburbs designed for cars: They serve many of people's needs poorly. Homes, jobs and schools are far apart. Neighborhoods are made of strangers and cannot coalesce. A study of British cities found that for reasons of both crime and infrastructure (not wholly unrelated), the number of children who could walk to school alone fell from 80 percent in 1970 to 8 percent last year.

Even where the space to sprawl is unavailable, strangling congestion follows when public investment tries -- and inevitably fails -- to keep pace with development by building more and more roads. Bangkok's jams may be legendary, but they are no longer unusual.

Even double-digit economic growth is no help. It's part of the problem. Bangalore was India's chief business attraction a decade ago. Now pollution, power outages and congestion are driving investment out. "The sprawl has become unmanageable," says a former city administrator, "to the point that any further growth would be fatal."

Having chosen automobile production as a "pillar industry," China is now having second thoughts, even as it is forced to cancel transit construction because of a lack of money. Because of land and energy shortages and pollution, "China just simply cannot sustain the development of a car economy," in the opinion of a prominent scientist involved in the debate. Seventeen cities want to build subways, but only three small systems are being funded. Meanwhile, roads are already clogged enough to hold back growth.

The Chinese may not know what to do, but they have the appropriate proverb, as always: "If we do not change the direction we are going, we will end up where we are headed." Let's hope it's not Bangkok.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

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