Of Cars and the Common Good

[another op-ed]

Fifty-one percent of New Yorkers do not own cars. The New York City population is estimated at 17 million people. Therefore, 8.67 million people in that city do not own cars. Car ownership in Sao Paulo, Brazil, a city of over 18 million, is 30% (http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/5139), or more than 12 million without a car. In Johannesburg, South Africa, population 7 million plus, 74% of households do not own a car (http://www.csir.co.za/enews/2007_dec/be_02.html ). In Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, only 5 to 10% of the population own a car. The raw numbers of people who do not own cars is huge, though the percentages vary widely from city to city. What doesn’t vary, though, is that in every one of these cities, car ownership is costly – for the owner, and the community.

More and more municipal and central governments around the globe are addressing problems related to private car ownership. In Sao Paulo, the city government has engineered an expansive and innovative bus system – or Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system – that transports millions of people every day. In China, gasoline and car registration taxes are determined in part in order to curb private car ownership and ridership. Those are two very different approaches: encourage public transport, and discourage private. Both approaches, though, aim at what the government should aim at: the general welfare.

City governments especially have incentive to promote a system of public transportation that keeps people employed, shops open and doing business, and crime and pollution at a minimum. Those governments therefore take on a significant role in promoting the general welfare. Public transportation is a big part of that promotion, and a lack of such transportation is associated with the negative aspects of urban life: pollution, traffic jams, de facto segregation as a consequence of “white flight” from the city centers.

It is sad to read stories of the emptying out of Johannesburg – not only in the long term, as whites move out to suburbs, but on a daily basis, as the downtown clears out almost completely after 5 p.m.. Check out the blog http://deathofjohannesburg.blogspot.com/ for photos and comments, to see what this looks like. A similar thing happens in American cities across the US, too. This is evident not only directly, as one drives through an empty downtown after the work force goes home, but also by the boast of those cities that do have vibrant downtowns after dark.

Though there is no one single and obvious pattern of car ownership and public transportation across the globe – in some places ownership is declining, in others it is rapidly increasing; in some cities the downtown increasingly empty, in others it is increasingly lively, in others it never was empty – but what is clear is that the quality of human life more and more is the quality of urban life, and that urban life is strongly characterized by the nature of transport within that urban area. The common welfare includes, on a national level, even the most remote and sparsely populated areas, but in the cities that welfare is more obvious, positively and negatively, and the consequences are greater and more immediate.

More and more of the planet’s largest cities are outside of the United States, and more and more cars are sold in those cities. Those cities, too, are now going through, in an accelerated way, what many American cities have gone through. But in a twist of population-induced irony, even though America has successfully worked through these issues in some of its cities, those other distant cities of the world are still effecting the quality of life here by way of global warming, increased fuel consumption, and increased standard of living and education that mean the movement of industry and commerce away from America. Just as our way of life in America has affected the rest of the world for most of the last half of the twentieth century. Let us hope that not only will those distant cities and people’s learn from our mistakes, but also our successes, and may we empathize with them in their education into the life of the private automobile.