Chinese Cities Use Prices to Reduce Demand for Autos--and It Works!

Marketplace reports on Beijing subway expansion and wonders if an increase in transit supply can cure congestion and pollution. The answer is no. Specifically, an increase in transit supply will have limited effects as long as driving is relatively cheap. Zhao Jian explains:

Just five years ago, the Beijing subway system was 70 miles long. Today it’s nearly four times that. But economics professor Zhao Jian at Beijing’s Jiaotong University says it’s going to take more than hundreds of miles of subway lines to solve Beijing’s traffic problem.
"The key to alleviating traffic and pollution in Beijing is to raise the cost of owning and using cars," says Zhao. "As it stands, parking fees are very low and traffic tickets aren’t that expensive. This needs to change."

As a counter example, Shanghai has very different policies:

In Shanghai, on the other hand, a license plate typically costs as much as the car itself. And that’s meant Shanghai, which has a bigger, more affluent population than Beijing, has half as many cars and is often spared Beijing’s persistent toxic haze.

Red Means Go

Jalopnik lists ten ways that "city planners" screw up traffic lights. Link here. City planners are getting unfairly blamed here, but we'll go with it.

I didn't know that in 1966 China almost switched the colors of traffic lights as part of the cultural revolution. Red meant go and green meant stop. Details here. Red, the color of the revolution, should not be associated with stopping. Red means go associates the color with progress! And, if enacted, lots of crashes. However, it is not obvious that the color of the lights makes a difference in many cases:

China's Airport Expansion

James Fallows has a post with a number of links regarding China's aviation ambitions. One link to highlight is the story about the remarkable growth of the number of Chinese airports. The Telegraph reports that China will build 70 new airports and expand 100 more in the next few years. In contrast, the US has built two new airports over the past 30 or so years (Denver and Indianapolis) and many airports have expanded, but very few have added new runways. This does not mean that the US should go on an airport expansion binge to keep up with China. (The logic that the US has to keep up with China is the main argument for high speed rail investment in the US, at least according to Andy Kunz, the CEO of US High Speed Rail, and America 2050.)  The rapid expansion of Chinese airports reflects the poor quality of existing facilities (if there are any), rapidly growing demand for services and lots of speculative construction of currently empty airports. The key lesson from Chinese infrastructure investment is that the country is investing widely in many different technologies, and it is doing so because the infrastructure needs are widespread. Transportation planners and officials in the US should keep in mind the US needs for transport investment are very different than China's.

VW's Hovercar: The Future of Flying Cars is Maglev

This is a month or so old, but I missed it. The above video is of a VW hovercar concept (check out the hovercar negotiating what appears to be an anarchist parking lot at about the 2:50 mark!). Here is a story from the Environmental News Service about the contest VW had in China that inspired the maglev car. Rather than consider the impracticality of embedding electromagnetic sensors into road networks let's just revel in the awesomeness of the vision. Other winning concepts were the "Music Car" and the "Smart Key."

Designated Driver Services Sprout in Chinese Cities

China recently increased the severity of drunken driving penalties. As intended, people are less interested in driving around after drinking and there are fewer drunken driving cases than before. However, a new market for designated driver services has sprung up and is realizing tremendous growth according to this China Daily article. From the story:

According to the Ministry of Public Security's Traffic Management Bureau, from May 1 last year to April 20, traffic police handled 354,000 cases of driving under the influence of alcohol nationwide, down by 41.7 percent compared with the same period in the previous year. Drunken driving cases totaled 54,000, registering a 44.1 percent drop.
Instead, the designated driver business is booming in big cities.
"There are about 50 companies registered that provide designated driver service in Chengdu (capital of Sichuan province), and most of these were set up in the past year," said Chen Xu, vice-president of Chengdu Designated Driver Service Association.
"We received about 80 orders to chauffeur drunken passengers every day in the first four months of this year, an increase of more than 40 percent compared with the same period last year," said Wang Wei, manager of Beijing Luantai, which provides driver training, car rental and designated driving services.
Many hotels and entertainment venues have also cooperated with companies that provide designated driver service for the convenience of customers who consume alcohol.
"At least seven or eight of our customers ask us to call the designated driver company to arrange drivers for them every night," said Wang Jianbin, service director of a branch of Partyworld in Beijing's Chaoyang district.

Yet these services are unregulated and have difficulty buying insurance:

Designated driver service is a new sector in China and laws and regulations are absent, Chen said. "There is no government department in charge of the service."
Liu Jing, the manager of Changyinwuyou in Beijing, holds a similar opinion.
"Many problems still exist in the sector," said Liu. "For example, we cannot buy insurance for our designated drivers as there is no such type of insurance in China. So things become thorny, if a car accident happens."

Auto insurance is a bit weird in China anyway, and many (most?) crashes are settled for cash at the time of the event.

These types of one-way taxi services are critical for cities. Hopefully Chinese cities will figure out how to support the services and other cities will adopt similar measures.

Future Transport Technologies

Siemens is getting ready to unveil their 'eHighway' technologies. See the above video for an explanation how hybrid trucks will connect to overhead powerlines for electric travel. Designboom has a post on these technologies here.

From Popular Science, a fellow says we (he?) can build a starship U.S.S. Enterprise in about 20 years. Here is his website. BTE Dan, as this fellow is known, suggests this project will cost $1 trillion and he has identified tax increases and budget cuts to pay for it (this will apparently be a U.S. project. Sorry Federation!).

Also from Popular Science, a whole issue devoted to future air travel including electric planes and new supersonic aircraft. James Fallows' piece on China's aviation investment and planning is worth reading. The story begins:

When discussing any environmental issue in China, it’s always a struggle to decide which deserves more emphasis: how dire the situation is, or how hard Chinese authorities are trying to cope with it. China’s skies, waters and even sources of food are some of the most poisonously contaminated on Earth. Its efforts to curtail pollution and develop cleaner energy sources are some of the world’s most ambitious.
This tension also informs China’s plans for aviation. The immediate threat posed by airline emissions in China is less obviously dire than, say, the particulate pollution that so often makes big-city air opaque, or the heavy-metal tainting of food and groundwater supplies that has contributed to China’s current cancer epidemic. But airplane emissions are significant and will become more so, especially as aerospace grows faster than most other parts of China’s economy.
Demand for air travel has grown little in the Western world in the decade since the 9/11 attacks, but it has increased fourfold in China, and is growing in the rest of the developing world too. The U.S. and all the countries in Europe together have fewer than 10 new commercial airports now under construction; China is building perhaps 100 new ones and expanding many more. Boeing and Airbus base their major sales hopes for the coming generation of airliners in China. Meanwhile, the Chinese government is investing heavily in the aircraft that may eventually compete against them, Comac’s regional ARJ21 and long-haul C919.
Like so many aspects of China’s growth, all of this will have serious consequences for the environment. The world’s airliners produce about 2 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions and play at least twice as large a role in climate change because the effect of CO2 and some other greenhouse gases is greater at high altitude. Aviation’s share of global emissions has been rising, and China’s share in the aviation total has been rising faster still. If the current trend were to continue, efforts to reduce emissions elsewhere could be swamped by the sheer increase in air travel in the skies over China.

He covers a lot of ground about GPS technologies, algae fuels and  flight planning, all of which matter for US and European aviation.

The Downside of Density: Shanghai is Sinking

China Daily reports that Shanghai, China is sinking due to too much high rise construction. From the story:

A diminishing water table, combined with a growing number of skyscrapers, is causing large areas of China to sink, increasing flood risk and endangering the rail network, according to a survey released recently by the China Geological Survey.
The government has already launched a number of measures to combat the problem and a plan of action was approved by the State Council in February.
Research shows the most vulnerable spots are in the North China Plain, the Yangtze River Delta and the Fenwei Basin, covering a combined total area of 79,000 square kilometers - more than 100 times the size of Singapore.
More than 50 cities in these areas are now at least 20 centimeters lower than they were in the 1970s, the survey said.

The sinking cities may threaten transportation links:

The situation may become worse with the construction of high-speed rail, Wu Aimin, director of the geological survey and technology department at the China Geological Environment Monitoring Institute, told the Economic Herald.
As China enters a boom period for high-speed rail construction, authorities should monitor subsidence near railways, such as the high-speed rail linking Beijing and Shanghai.
"If the ground sinks, even by a few millimeters, it will threaten the safety of high-speed rail," Wu was quoted as saying.

As if the Chinese high speed rail program didn't have enough problems. All of the skyscrapers come with a cost:

There are about 65 buildings higher than 200 meters in Shanghai, while Tokyo has 45, according to Emporis, one of the world's leading providers of building statistics.
A study released by the China Geological Survey in 2008 showed that total economic losses due to land subsidence reached nearly 333 billion yuan ($53 billion) from 1956 to 2008 in the North China Plain.

This is an unexpected downside of density.