Traffic congestion remains a problem, even at night, in populous Shanghai, China. Increased motor vehicle use in all of China’s major cities has led to both traffic jams and air pollution. Photo courtesy kanigma.

Since the mid-1980s, air pollution has worsened substantially in most mega-cities as a result of increased urbanization, industrialization, and motorization, empirical evidence has shown. This has greatly extended adverse health impacts from some highly exposed sub-groups to the general population. Because motor vehicles consume nearly 80 percent of the world’s transport-related energy rand most of the world’s automobiles are found in cities, the transport sector is a major contributor to urban air pollution. The key to reversing the negative trends in urban air pollution is to persuade policymakers in rapidly urbanizing countries to rethink the fundamental objectives of urban transport planning. The place to start is the largest rapidly urbanizing country, China.

China’s current transportation revolution—a shift to motor vehicles, private cars in particular, as a dominant means of transport—has substantial implications not only for the environment but for the global climate as well. China’s motor vehicle fleet is still small, but these vehicles are already a significant source of urban pollution. Automobiles are now the primary source of overall air pollution in China’s major cities, accounting for 50 to 60 percent of total emissions, research shows. This is compelling evidence, though it is difficult to distinguish vehicular emissions from other types of emissions in their contribution to air pollution.

Even though the number of motor vehicles in China has tripled from 2.4 million in 1984 to 13.2 million in 1998, China is still one of the least motorized of the world’s major economies. Nevertheless, with the motor vehicle population expected to expand by a factor of 13 to 22 between 2000 and 2020, China is experiencing one of the highest annual motorization growth rates in the world. If the private car ownership rate rises to merely the average for low and middle-income economies, 24 per 1,000 citizens, passenger vehicles could increase to 3.6 million units by 2030. That would be one-quarter of the United States’ level in 2000.

China’s rapidly growing vehicle fleet has substantially damaged the country’s environment, particularly in major urban centers where traffic jams are becoming a daily feature. In 2000 the World Resources Institute attributed up to 70 percent of carbon monoxide emissions in Beijing and Shanghai to motor vehicles. Thus China’s major metropolitan regions are already blanketed with heavy smog.

Three interrelated aspects of motorization have contributed to higher levels of vehicle emissions: increasing transportation intensity, traffic congestion, and fuel intensity. First, in most urban centers, the traffic volume of motor vehicles has expanded at a much higher rate than the growth of vehicles. In Beijing, for instance, the daily traffic volume has grown by 20 percent annually in recent years, even though the number of motor vehicles has increased by only 14 percent each year. That is, total vehicle emissions are on an upward trend not simply because there are more cars but also because each car is driven more.

Second, in recent years the number of motor vehicles has grown nearly twice as quickly as the expansion of highway networks, leading to increased road congestion and much lower average driving speeds in major urban centers. Also because of poor road quality and a mix of variable-speed vehicles, the average speed of traffic has fallen to 15 to 20 km per hour in urban areas and 10 to 15 km per hour in city cores. Lower driving speeds increase emissions per kilometer because motors are less efficient at lower speeds and take longer to travel the same distance.

Third, motor vehicles have become the principal source of major air pollutants in urban China because of outdated designs of the current fleet of motor vehicles and inadequate emission standards for new vehicles. By the mid-1990s, most of the vehicles produced were still using technologies from the 1970s and 1980s that had been transferred from industrialized countries. For example, in the late 1990s, truck engines designs were more than 20 years old, and most car engine designs were at least 10 years old. As a result, emissions from these vehicles were often 10 to 50 times those of vehicles in the United States and Japan.

Only recently has the Chinese government begun to acknowledge the importance of vehicular pollution control: leaded gasoline was phased out and automobile-related environmental protection issues were formally included in the country’s tenth Five-Year Plan. A range of technically oriented solutions, including techniques in road and transport demand management, have been identified by the research community to help reduce vehicular emissions. Instituting emission and fuel-economy standards while encouraging fuel-efficiency improvements. China must overcome major barriers in introducing and implementing these technical solutions, such as weak R&D and a low rate of technology dissemination. These roadblocks are not insurmountable, however, given that China can leap ahead by adopting advanced clean vehicle technologies and products from abroad.

It is institutional constraint, not technology gaps, that stands in the way of building a sustainable transport system in China. Attempts to reduce emissions from automobile use are hampered by wide contradictions between leading government policies. At the national level, powerful ministries responsible for economic development have identified the automobile manufacturing industry as a major pillar of the country’s economy. Convinced by its capacity to stimulate economic growth, the motorization strategy has received a full blessing from the central government. Despite concerns about constrained oil production and road capacities as well as adverse environmental impacts, the national government still gives enormous support to the unbridled growth of the automobile industry. Moreover, regulations and action programs designed to reduce the negative impacts, mostly promulgated by national-level environmental protection authorities, are rendered largely ineffective because they are not enforced by provincial and city-level governments keen on gaining from the presence of automobile manufacturing plants within their jurisdictions.

Judging by the unprecedented growth of Chinese automobile manufacturing and sales, it is evident that vehicular emissions will continue to increase even if tougher emissions standards are implemented and traffic management improved. Given that growth in automobile use is inevitable under China’s government-sanctioned, mass private motoring strategy, the need for developing innovative urban transport policies as well as sustainable urban land use planning practices is all the more pressing.