Car Trouble

By Jay Walljasper, Ode. Posted December 29, 2005.

I am sitting in the back of a motionless taxi on the way from New York's JFK airport to a meeting in the city. It's a blazing hot morning. A preview of global warming, I wonder? I felt vaguely guilty about hailing a cab to research a story on innovative ideas in transportation, especially when I knew that a new train connection from the airport had recently opened, but I didn't want to be late for my appointment. Yet now here I am stuck in traffic, and it isn't even rush hour.

My taxi driver, recently arrived from India, knows a few tricks. He edges the cab toward an exit ramp and then barrels along city streets for a few blocks before heading back onto a slightly less congested stretch of the expressway. His radio is tuned to traffic reports -- a long litany of pile-ups, closed lanes, construction delays, or inexplicable slowdowns on most major roads. "It's one big parking lot out there," the announcer says, and I suddenly feel an exhaust-induced burning at the back of my throat.

"How's that new Air Train to the airport?" I casually ask the driver just after he'd swerved off the expressway again and nearly sideswiped a hapless pedestrian who dared to cross the street. "People don't want to take trains," he declares in a voice that clearly indicates this portion of our conversation is over. We fight endless tides of traffic all the way to Manhattan. Sixty minutes and $45 later, I arrive at the offices of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) 38 minutes late.

I sometimes find it hard to believe there could be any more cars in the world than there are today. Yet if economic forecasts are to be believed, auto use will rise dramatically in coming years as emerging middle-class households in China, India and even Africa achieve the universal dream of owning their own means of transportation.

People everywhere are enraptured by the idea of speedy personal mobility that automobiles seem to offer -- a love affair best evoked in an anecdote told by Song Laoshi, a teacher in Beijing, to a journalist from the Guardian: "When I was a child, we used to walk miles to the nearest road and then just stand and wait. You will never guess why. We wanted a car to pass so that we could breathe in the fumes. For us, that was really exciting."

"Of course everybody is fascinated by cars," says Walter Hook, executive director of ITDP, which promotes sustainable transportation projects throughout the developing world. "I am too. I just love those Cooper Minis. They're beautiful.

"But I don't buy this business that car culture is unstoppable," he adds. "Sure, people in the developing world dream of owning cars, but they also want beautiful public places, a metro, bike lanes, pedestrian zones and sidewalk cafes. What they want is to be Paris, not look like some American suburb."

Hook knows quite a lot about both suburban America -- where he grew up outside Washington, D.C., and at age 16 abandoned his bicycle for a fast car -- and the developing world, where he fell back in love with biking when working for an import-export firm in China. He now cycles through New York's heavy traffic most days, except when he's in Asia, Africa or Latin America advocating the idea of balanced transportation policies -- which means that governments invest in transit, sidewalks and bikeways, rather than pouring all their money into more roads.

Working with branch offices in Ghana and Senegal, an affiliate group in Berlin, and field staff in India, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and Colombia, ITDP undertakes practical projects like equipping African health workers and tsunami relief volunteers with bicycles, promoting the rickshaw as a sustainable alternative to cars in Asian cities, and advising municipal officials everywhere on building 21st-century bus systems.

Hook emphasizes that sustainable transportation is not only an environmental concern, but a question of justice. "We need to remember that owning a car is out of reach for all but the upper 20 percent of people in the developing world," he notes. And when automobiles come to dominate a nation's streets, nonmotorists -- even if they comprise a large majority of the population -- suffer in terms of both mobility and safety. Walking and biking become too dangerous. Hook notes more than 50 percent of road fatalities in some developing nations are pedestrians.

"You can't just force people not to drive," Steven Logan, editor of Car Busters magazine, tells me as we sprint across a street in Prague where motorists actually seem to speed up when seeing us in the crosswalk. We are walking to the office of the World Carfree Network -- a collective of young Europeans and North Americans who publish Car Busters magazine and enthusiastically promote visions of a world with fewer automobiles.

"If someone in India wants a car, sure, I can tell them it's better to take a train," he adds, "But they can say, 'Yeah, you grew up with cars, and now you don't want me to have one.'"

Logan, 30, concedes he had his own car as a teenager in suburban Toronto and drove it to high school every day even though the school was only a short bike ride from home. But spending a semester abroad in Amsterdam, he discovered he could live a modern, fulfilling life without a car. "It was great. I biked everywhere," he recalls. "Then I went home to the suburbs of Toronto and found I was really depressed."

Jay Walljasper is the executive editor of Ode magazine.

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