INCHING THROUGH Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s megalopolis, Banyan recently had a back-seat view of one of Asia’s monstrous traffic jams. His driver lived in Kota Kinabalu, a sleepy city far away across the water in Malaysian Borneo. So good was business in Kuala Lumpur that he flew in for weeks-long work stints. It seemed clear that much of the money is made sitting nearly stationary on Kuala Lumpur’s incongruously named expressways.
Successful cities pack economic activity into dense areas. This produces welcome “agglomeration effects”, but when the agglomeration happens by moving about by car, roads snarl up.
Traffic jams are a scourge. Lost time hurts productivity. There is a human toll on health, both mentally and in terms of air pollution and road safety. Asian cities are world-class for traffic. Of the top 20 slowest-moving cities ranked by TomTom, a navigation service, 12 are in Asia—a mark of fast growth and mismanaged urban development.
The fix is no mystery. Cities with good traffic make private cars less desirable to own and use. Singapore has punishingly expensive ownership quotas, as well as congestion pricing. Tokyo has fees and tolls, and tough limits on parking space. Both cities also have world-class public-transport systems, and housing built near stations.
Yet elsewhere in Asia, politicians are shy about penalising car ownership because it clashes with growing middle-class aspirations. The car is a potent symbol of status and freedom. Nor do governments want to hurt domestic carmakers employing millions. Across much of Asia, car sales in recent years have been on a roll.
So politicians opt to build more roads instead. Two lanes tacked on to the Kuala Lumpur-Karak expressway will let an additional 2,800 cars an hour whizz by, its developer boasts. In India, new lanes will soon be added to Kolkata’s eastern bypass. In the Philippines, the previous president’s pledge to “Build! Build! Build!” and the incumbent’s promise to “Build Better More” mean more car-centric infrastructure. In many parts of Asia, politicians and their cronies skim money off the top of road projects—another incentive to build.
Yet expanding road infrastructure alone nearly always fails. Drivers end up driving more and moving farther from the city centre. The city sprawls, but congestion is little changed. Car-centricity is self-reinforcing, Walter Theseira of the Singapore University of Social Sciences points out. More space for roads and parking means less for greenery and for people on foot.
Many Asian cities have reached a point that serves no one well. Wanting to protect the middle class undermines fairness instead. Car commuters lose time, respiratory health and their sanity. The rich are not immune, but can better insulate themselves: drivers are hired and, in cities like Cambodia’s Phnom Penh, obscenely big and showy SUVs are acquired to serve as mobile offices and entertainment rooms. Pedestrians, especially the poor, are cut out entirely from many benefits of city life and suffer most of the risks of traffic, in terms of fumes and accidents. In Phnom Penh they don’t even have the pavements, because the SUVs have parked up on them, engines running, while the boss is at lunch.
Asian cities are not doomed to gridlock. In the 2000s Seoul made ambitious changes. Bus routes were redesigned, and congestion charges, low-emission zones and voluntary no-driving days curbed demand. Traffic speeds rose by up to four-fifths. Elsewhere, the idea of congestion pricing is doing the rounds again, notably in Bangkok. Jakarta has pondered a Singapore-style congestion toll for years, having failed with milder measures. (One such, “three-in-one” carpooling lanes, led to a cottage industry of “jockeys” being paid to sit in cars, and was scrapped.) This year Hanoi will launch a pilot programme restricting high-emissions vehicles in some areas. In the Philippine city of Baguio, north of the capital, Manila, a proposed $4 congestion fee has sparked controversy, even though other fixes have failed.
The risks for politicians are real. Baguio’s proposed fee led to criticism that it would favour the rich; the mayor rushed to clarify that “nothing is final yet.” But the criticism gets it backwards. Easing traffic makes a city fairer. What is more, cities that have enacted congestion pricing see public support for it rise over time, as people see the improvements with their own eyes. More politicians should take the gamble.■
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