Beijing’s “No Car” Days: How to Win Friends and Not Influence Traffic
Beijing’s “No Car” Days: How to Win Friends and Not Influence Traffic
In a booming mega-city where 1,000 new cars hit the streets everyday, encouraging its recently-minted drivers to opt for public transportation is not an easy task. Leave it to Beijing. Over a quarter of a million of the city’s drivers have pledged to stop driving for one day over the next week in an attempt to ease traffic and improve air quality for the thousands of dignitaries attending the city’s Sino-Africa Forum. Along with gathering “no car” pledges by drivers from 476 organizations, including many of the city’s driving clubs and private businesses, the city has ordered 80 percent of the municipal government’s and half of the central government’s vehicles off the roads. They’re even shortening school hours.
Aside from helping to feed China’s hunger for Africa’s raw materials (check this space for more coverage on that soon), the country’s biggest summit in history serves as a convenient dry run for the Olympic Games in 2008, a coming-out party for the city that is set to add 1 million people to the streets. On the one hand, the “no car” day is an impressive and good-spirited initiative, and one you’d be hard pressed to find in any other metropolis. But even if Beijing’s charm offensive (which includes painting its grass green) looks good, “no car” days haven’t had much effect before. And they’re certainly unlikely to reverse the deeper problem: years of shoddy transportation planning that have led to “11-hour rush hours” beneath perpetually mucky skies.
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(Via Treehugger.)
[tags]ecology, car[/tags]
