A billion cars: the road ahead.

People in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe want cars just as much as Americans do. The skyrocketing demand is raising hopes, hackles, and questions about sustainability.

At the mid-point of the 20th century, when there were 2.6 billion people on Earth, there were 50 million cars. Now, as we near the end of the century, the human population has more than doubled, but the car population has increased ten-fold - to 500 million. Today, everyone seems to want a car. And within another 25 years there may be 1 billion cars on the world's roads.

It is not in already car-dominated Los Angeles, Paris, or Rome where this is happening, but in the booming cities of the developing world. In China, for example, there are just 1.8 million passenger cars today - one for every 670 people. In ten years, there may be twice as many, and by 2010, that number is projected to rise to 20 million. Such a scenario seems likely to be repeated in most parts of the developing world.

The potential effects of this automotive explosion - on the quality of human life and the sustainability of all life - are staggering. But perceptions of what those effects will mean vary widely, depending on who is doing the perceiving. The world's automotive industries view the projected growth in car demand as a stupendous business opportunity, and a great economic windfall for those countries whose factories can meet the growing demand.

This view is shared by the governments of fast-developing countries like China, India, and Brazil, whose own auto industries are beginning to flourish. Since the American automotive boom of the 1950s and '60s, which coincided with a rapid rise in U.S. economic output and affluence, the standard prescription for development has held that any country aspiring to rapid economic growth must rely on the auto industry as a central industrial "pillar."

Increasingly affluent consumers in developing countries, who represent the potential auto market of the near future, also share this excitement. The vast majority of that market will be in Asia and Latin America, and in formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, which are now bent on catching up with their affluent neighbors to the west. To these consumers, cars are not just transportation; they symbolize the highest rewards of the consumer culture: a proof of wealth, power, and personal freedom.

Yet consumers, industrialists, and economic planners are all neglecting the prodigious strains that automotive expansion is placing on both human and environmental health. Motor vehicle transport accounts for half of the world's total oil consumption, generates nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, and has pervasive impacts on land use and air quality. Tailpipe exhaust is now the single largest source of air pollution - surpassing wood fires, coal-burning power plants, and chemical manufacturing - in nearly half the cities of the world. And cities everywhere are choking on the sheer numbers of motor vehicles and the roads that attempt to accommodate them. The result is a declining quality of life in car-dominated cities worldwide.

How these different views are reconciled will go a long way toward determining not just how people will move about during the next century, but what kind of world it will be.

AUTO-MANIA SPREADS TO THE DEVELOPING WORLD

In 1995, world new car sales, at 35 million, arc estimated to have set a record for the second consecutive year. They are projected to rise another 4 percent, to more than 36 million, in 1996. But most of these cars still go to a relatively small number of affluent markets. Countries that make up 16 percent of the world's population - in North America, Europe, Japan, and Oceania - own 81 percent (and produce 88 percent) of all automobiles. The United States alone accounts for 35 percent of car ownership and 25 percent of production.

But as markets in North America and Western Europe become saturated, auto manufacturers are eyeing developing countries, where the rate of car ownership is much lower: China has only 1 percent as many cars as the United States, and India only 2 percent. Since these two countries together have eight times the population of the United States, they constitute a largely untapped market that can be perceived as surpassing anything in the history of commerce. And with China's economy growing at rates unprecedented even in the industrial world, the demand for cars there is beginning to soar.

With the fail of the Iron Curtain and the spread of commercial advertising and trade to even the remotest places, developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc have been uncritically following the development model of the rich countries - striving to emulate both their economies and their lifestyles. The automobile, once an icon of material success mainly for Americans and Europeans, has acquired that meaning everywhere - so much so that even in China, where most adults depend on bicycles for their transportation needs, cycling is now seen as projecting an image of underdevelopment.

In 1993, bicycles were banned from Nanjing Donglu, Shanghai's main street and site of its prestigious shopping area, just so they would be out of sight of tourists and wealthy Chinese shoppers. Cars, on the other hand, are still allowed to use this street despite the paralyzing traffic congestion. Similarly, in Jakarta, Indonesia, thousands of cycle rickshaws were confiscated - allegedly to "reduce congestion," but in reality because they were projecting the wrong image. In these and many other countries, the makers of official policy now aspire to the same kind of large-scale car ownership they see in the West.

So far, nothing has happened to persuade them that this may not be possible - or even desirable. In some parts of Asia where economics are growing fast, car sales are growing faster. Since 1990, South Korea's GDP has increased almost 50 percent, but its car sales have jumped 100 percent, to 2 million a year. China's new car sales are expected to jump by nearly 30 percent in the next year, to 750,000, and to pass 1 million by the end of the decade. In Thailand, the Land Transport Department reports that the growth of new car sales over the last decade is expected to have reached 400 percent. In Malaysia, too, sales of new vehicles increased by 25 percent in the last year alone. With Malaysia's economy forecast to grow at more than 8 percent for an eighth consecutive year, there is unlikely to be any slowdown in the sales figures, according to the Malaysian Motor Traders' Association.

Latin American and the former Eastern Bloc countries are demanding cars at similarly high rates. Auto sales in Brazil have doubled in the last five years, hitting 1.4 million in 1995, In Mexico, before the currency collapse of December 1994, domestic car sales were headed for a 1995 total of at least 600,000 and an annual total of 1.2 million by the end of the decade. In the Czech Republic, new vehicle registrations have increased by 500,000 since 1990, and there are now 2 million cars in this country of 10 million people. Even in Russia, where the economy is widely presumed to be in ruins, car sales are surging; in Moscow, the number of cars on the streets has doubled in the past two years.

What is most astonishing about this growth is that it has happened under difficult circumstances. For example, unlike the populations of mid-century North America and Europe, those of the developing countries of the 1990s are mostly poor. While an increasing number of wealthy individuals in those countries can afford cars, the costs of roads, parking spaces, air pollution, and traffic accidents have to be borne by entire societies. Moreover, there are substantial land-use constraints today, particularly in the huge potential auto markets of Southeast Asia, that were not problems for the wide-open America of the mid-century.

Despite these constraints and despite compelling evidence that Western-style automotive development on a global scale could have disastrous effects on human and planetary well-being, the demand for cars is soaring across the developing world. This demand has not only stimulated developing economies, but has attracted a growing influx of foreign car manufacturers hoping to establish lucrative new markets.

THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY RUSHES TO THE NEW EL DORADO 

The giant auto manufacturers of the industrialized countries can hardly contain their glee at the trends they see abroad. Colonialism may be long gone, and the military dominance of the superpowers may have ended, but the multinational companies that are their legacies are gearing up for a new invasion of the developing world - with their latest models of Toyotas, Fords, and VWs. They see this as a triumph of capitalism and Western culture, as well as of their own marketing vision.

Developing countries, meanwhile, have no interest in repelling this invasion; they see their expanding markets as big enough to accommodate both the multinationals (who will pave the way) and their own fast-growing auto industries. Moreover, car-making provides business for the rest of the economy - in its consumption of steel, plastics, and oil, and its stimulation of highway construction, parts manufacturing, retail sales, and service jobs. Typically, for each job in car manufacturing, five to ten jobs are created in parts supply and support industries. In Brazil, for example, new plant investments in the auto industry ($10 billion between 1995 and 1998) are expected to be matched by investments from parts manufacturers and associated industries - adding up to a $20 billion industry before the end of the decade.

There is a political as well as commercial seductiveness about this trend; political leaders like being able to satisfy the growing consumer appetites of their populations. Between these leaders, the media watching this phenomenon, and those consumers who can afford to be part of it, there is a growing excitement about the anticipated automobilization of the developing world. Recent newspaper headlines read: "India's Car Production Set to Double by Year 2000"; "Boom in Polish Sales Draws Western Carmakers"; "Asian Growth Fuels Car Sales Boom"; "Chinese Gear Up For Huge Rise in Cars by 2010." The international press has effusively reported - with little discussion of potential risks or drawbacks - the plans of Renault and Mercedes-Benz to invest $1 billion each to build cars in Brazil; of Ford to enter into a large auto manufacturing joint-venture in Vietnam; of the intense competition among Volkswagen, General Motors, Mercedes-Benz, and Porsche AG, among others, to get the inside track in China. Business publications from Sao Paulo to Kuala Lumpur speak almost breathlessly about the forecasted boom in the developing world, citing skyrocketing growth and demand.

"The Asian market will soon be as big as the total European and North American markets" (20 million cars produced and sold per year), predicts Takahiro Fujimoto, an auto industry guru at the University of Tokyo. China alone plans to increase vehicle output from 1.4 million units in 1994 to 3 million in 2000. In India, economic reforms and easier consumer credit have sharply expanded the country's car market, doubling output to nearly 300,000 vehicles since 1991. The entry of foreign auto makers such as General Motors, Chrysler, Peugeot and Daewoo is likely to swell production to 1 million cars in the year 2000, according to industry estimates. Thailand is also fast becoming a base for auto manufacturing in Southeast Asia - a trend propelled by the appreciation of the Japanese Yen and new incentives from the Thai government to encourage foreign auto companies to set up shop in the country. Over the past year, Ford, Honda, Mazda, Toyota, Nissan, and several other major companies have announced plans to either set up production facilities or to expand the existing ones. Production of cars in Thailand is expected to jump from 74,000 in 1986 to an estimated 1 million by 2000. While many of these will be exported to other Asian markets, most will stay in Thailand to satisfy its growing local market.

No other emerging market can match the lure of China, however. Fifteen years ago, China began a series of economic reforms that has led to a rate of economic growth averaging three to four times as fast as in developed countries. Both the rate and the absolute magnitude of this growth are unprecedented. Since the early 1980s, the income of the average Chinese family has doubled. Now, when the auto makers look at China, they envision a market where vehicle registrations will exceed 20 million in the next decade. Predictably, the established auto manufacturers are rushing to secure deals to produce vehicles there. General Motors, Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz already have contracts, and Ford is expected to join them.

Meanwhile, since 1979, China's domestic car production has been growing at more than 15 percent a year. With ambitious plans to rev up this industry still further, the Chinese government is hoping that automobiles, along with computers, telecommunications, and petrochemicals, will keep the country's national economic growth rolling at high speed over the next few decades. According to official projections, output will reach 3.5 million cars a year by 2010, with two-thirds of them sold to private motorists. China currently has 1.2 million passenger cars - most used for official and business purposes - only 5 percent of which are privately owned. This number is projected to rise more than 20-fold by the year 2010, with individual ownership increasing to 60 percent of all vehicles on the road. "Having a family car will signal that a Chinese citizen's life has turned from a moderately well-to-do to a rich one," say the authors of a recent study by an agency called the Strategic Development Research Team of China's Family Car.

GROWING DEMAND, GROWING CONCERN

In all the excitement about the prospects of a booming automobile industry, few policymakers have paused to ask just what this will mean, beyond the anticipated economic growth and consumer satisfaction. The perceived benefits are familiar enough, but the total cost to the world has never been added up. Some parts of that cost - the toll taken by continually worsening air pollution in Mexico City, the paralyzing congestion in Bangkok, or the accident fatalities in Cairo - are simply being brushed off by governments too impatient for the short-term rewards to weigh he full ramifications of automobilization. Other parts of the cost - such as the long-range effects of emissions on climate, agriculture, and biodiversity - are often ignored altogether.

It doesn't take long before the ecological and social costs of too many cars begin to undermine the very qualities all these cars were expected to enhance, including the robustness of the economy. In Bangkok, for instance, the levels of automotive air pollution, health deterioration, and productivity losses caused by congestion have become so bad that investors have been scared off and some international businesses are now leaving the city. Even a cursory analysis shows that pursuit of an automobile-based development strategy could, in fact, invite a tragic setback both to the developing countries and to the world.

To begin with, even the direct costs of purchase are heavy burdens in developing countries, where the average per capita income is often less than one-tenth the price of a new car. One Beijing couple, for example, recently told a reporter for The Washington Post that they were able to buy their car thanks to the wife's private business; if they had to count on Mr. Wang's salary from the magazine he works at, "it would have taken ten years, and that's if we didn't eat or drink." In most countries, it would take a lifetime for the average person to save enough money to buy a car - let alone insure, maintain, park and fuel it. The new cars being built in China during the late 1990s will cost around $10,000 each. Yet, even after doubling during the last decade, the annual income of an average urban Chinese family is still only about $2,200 in terms of purchasing power. In India, similarly, the new foreign-built cars will cost at least $11,000, whereas the majority of India's people earn about $1,250 in a year. A representative of Toyota Motor Corporation in China recently admitted that car ownership was, at least initially, "for the rich people in this country."

Even if most people could afford these initial outlays, the dream of "a car for every family," which the Chinese government has been promoting, does not burden itself with the questions of where and how these cars will be driven, parked, fueled, and repaired. Such costs are immense, even to a society like the United States, which has already built its infrastructure. In Laos, Honduras, or Zaire, and perhaps a hundred other countries, most of the roads, bridges, and service facilities that would be needed have not been built yet. China currently has fewer paved roads than did Depression-era America, and building a national highway network is a distant illusion. The costs of building enough infrastructure to support the addition of nearly half a million cars to China's fleet each year will require enormous financial resources - most probably diverted from other vital services such as hospitals or schools.

Even in countries where cars are commonplace and the infrastructure is already in place, the costs of auto transport have turned out to be far more formidable than most citizens would have thought. A study by the Washington D.C.-based World Resources Institute (WRI), for example, showed that the costs of driving that motorists do not pay directly come to some $300 billion per year in the U.S. alone. That includes money spent on road construction and repairs, routine street maintenance, traffic management, and parking enforcement. It also includes lost economic productivity resulting from traffic congestion, as well as the medical costs of automotive emissions-caused diseases and over 2 million accidents (including 45,000 fatalities) each year. This works out to more than $2,000 per car in the U.S., in addition to the costs of purchase, maintenance, and fuel.

Perhaps even more crucially, the dream of driving glosses over a critical difference between the environmental constraints that applied in the mid-20th century when industrial countries built most of their infrastructure, and those that will apply in the world of the new millennium. The automobile got its first real impetus in a pre-World War II United States where land was plentiful, gasoline cheap, and worries about environmental impacts non-existent. In the developing world of the late 1990s, those conditions have changed.

One of the first major "external" costs of cars to come to public attention was air pollution - as dramatized by the notorious Los Angeles smogs of the 1960s. Since then, the problem has abated somewhat in U.S. cities but has severely worsened elsewhere. Today, more than a billion people are exposed to air with excessive particulate levels, mostly from motor vehicles. While considerable advances have been made over the past three decades in curbing tailpipe emissions and improving fuel efficiency, that progress has been outstripped by the rapid growth of auto fleets. The costs of vehicular air pollution are hard to assess because they include such elusive damages as lung and heart diseases, premature death, loss of productivity, and reduced crop yields, but even WRI's low estimate comes to $10 billion per year in the U.S alone.

In many cities of the developing world, air pollution from motor vehicles has become a health crisis. In Mexico City, the pollution from the city's 3.2 million cars is so pervasive that one school teacher found her students reaching for grey crayons when asked to draw the sky. In the countries of the former Eastern Bloc, auto exhaust has already replaced much of the industrial smog of the Communist days. In China's cities, which are among the most polluted in the world, the bad air was, for decades, caused primarily by the combustion of low-grade coal. With people moving about mainly by bicycle, cars contributed little to the problem. But as the recent surge of cars has begun to push bikes off the streets, the cars have added their exhaust to the brew.

Tailpipe exhaust also contributes to incipient climate change, by adding to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. An average car, getting 27.5 miles per gallon, emits 35 tons of carbon over its lifetime of 100,000 miles, and it is estimated that motor. vehicle transport globally accounts for close to 20 percent of all carbon emissions - 25 percent in the United States. If China attains its dream of a car for every family, the resulting emissions could increase carbon concentrations to an extent that would affect the entire world, and offset emissions reductions achieved in other countries.

Equally lamented, but unfortunately less subject to alleviation by technological fixes, is the problem of congestion. In Asia, automotive traffic jams only exacerbate an already severe congestion that precedes them: many Chinese and Indian cities are already crammed with bicycles, mopeds, trucks, buses, and even animals. In Delhi, with the addition of thousands of cars, travel times have almost doubled over the past ten years. Bangkok, once known as the "Venice of the East" with its network of canals on the Chao Phraya River, has now become the Los Angeles of the East, infamous for its traffic jams. Still, more than 500 new cars enter the city's road system every day, to edge along at average speeds of a little over 1 km per hour at peak periods - about half the speed of a slow walk. Many of these cities, such as Beijing, were built for the bicycle, not the automobile. Unlike American cities, they have very few parking spaces and often no parking garages. Most neighborhood streets and alleys are barely wide enough for one car, and the main thoroughfares generally cannot accommodate normal traffic.

Consequently, expanding auto fleets in developing countries will also open a Pandora's Box of problems related to land use. In industrialized countries, the construction of roads and highways has bulldozed an ever-larger share of the remaining forests, wetlands, watersheds, farmlands, parks, and historic or cultural areas. In the United States, close to half of all urban space is used to accommodate motor vehicles. More than 60,000 square miles of U.S. land is paved over - about 2 percent of total surface area, and the equivalent of 10 percent of all arable land. Dedicated to food production, that much land could produce enough grain to feed 200 million people per year. In the case of highly populated, agricultural countries like China and India, similar magnitudes of arable land lost to automobile transport could have devastating economic and social outcomes - aggravated poverty, dislocation of communities, and even a dangerously reduced capacity to produce food. As Lester R. Brown noted in an earlier issue of this magazine, the amount of land under cultivation in Asia is shrinking rapidly as new industrial and residential developments pave it over - even as the demand for food is rising.

The temptation to sacrifice agricultural yields in return for industrial development is apparently irresistible, particularly when it brings investments by foreign manufacturers. Vietnam, for example, had passed a law prohibiting the construction of factories on land used for growing rice, but recently made an exception in order to permit Ford Motor Company to go ahead with a $102 million project on a former rice paddy near Hanoi.

The land consumed by all the highways, parking lots, and service stations needed for major automotive development, of course, will be even larger. Besides reducing the world's food-producing capability overall, this will reduce the food security of highly populous countries like China. At the same time, higher automotive consumption will tend to reduce energy security, by making countries more dependent on imported oil. China, which exported both grain and oil until very recently, has had to shift to importing both.

The economic and social impacts of heavy automotive consumption thus reach far beyond what the car makers and development officials talk about - and sometimes in ways that planners have given little thought to. In Brazil, for example, apart from costing enormous sums to a government supposedly aiming to cut public spending, large road-building projects are displacing thousands of favelados, or slum dwellers, living in the outskirts of large cities like Sao Paulo.

Finally, there is the problem of motor vehicle accidents. Around the world, car crashes now claim nearly a half-million lives a year - the most common cause of violent death short of war. In many developing countries, where the roads are poorly maintained and traffic regulations often violated, the risks of traffic accidents and fatalities are especially high. In the early 1990s, fatality rates per 100 million vehicle-miles were 1000 in Malawi, 50 in Egypt, and 20 in Honduras, as compared with 2 in the U.S. The costs of these fatalities are unmeasurable, but even when road injuries (of which there are tens of millions each year) do not lead to death, they add up to huge medical costs, losses of workforce productivity, and disruptions of family or community life.

THE WAY OUT OF GRIDLOCK 

Raising questions about the developing world's penchant for cars is a sensitive undertaking, because it also raises questions about the glaring inequities that separate the world's rich and poor nations. These are the same questions that arose at the Earth Summit in 1992, when delegates of the affluent "North" expressed concerns about irreversible damages that would be done if the less-developed "South" tried to emulate what the North had done in its profligate past - and the delegates of the South pointedly replied that it was not their countries whose excessive consumption had led to the present plight of the planet. For every environmentalist or epidemiologist who warns of impending climate change or spreading lung disease, there is a development official or industrialist who replies that if Americans and Germans can have at least one car for every family, then it is unfair to say the Chinese or Nigerians can't.

To address this conflict simply by looking for the most politically negotiable middle ground may be a losing strategy. The real problem now is that a transportation system based heavily on cars is not viable for sustainable living in either the developed or the developing countries. Cars may be associated with freedom, but as Paul and Anne Ehrlich and Gretchen Daily note in their book The Stork and the Plow: The Equity Answer to the Human Dilemma, what serves freedom on a planet of 6 or 10 billion is not the same as what worked on a planet of 2 billion - when the automobile was in its heyday. Ironically, as pollution, congestion, accidents and urban unlivability increase, the widespread use of cars no longer grants but actually diminishes the freedom, mobility, and quick access to the things it once came to epitomize.

The way out of the dilemma may be a re-definition of what makes for "development". The ideas that "more traffic means more business," and that "cars are the rewards of success," are rarely questioned by most people. Yet, a very different image of successful development is taking hold in some places - that of a community built around well-operating public transit systems, designed to let people work, shop, go to school, and find recreation all within a short distance of their homes. In such communities, much of the mobility could be provided by bicycles or walking. This is the real image of a good life in a developed country, not the congested, polluted, and noisy streets of a metropolis with 10 million people inching along in their own automobiles at a frustrated 3 miles an hour, which is the average speed of a car in parts of New York City.

In this new understanding of development, satisfactions of mobility and freedom do not have to be provided by cars - whether in California or in India. Fresh approaches will be required, not just to the technology of auto transport, but more importantly, to the design of communities. Although there have been significant advances in the development of nonpolluting cars, these offer no panacea to all the other problems caused by a car-dominated system. Stricter exhaust standards or higher gasoline taxes can only partially solve pollution and congestion problems. The core issues are the kinds of basic land use and urban design policies that lead people to dwell in suburbs far from their workplaces, and force whole communities to design themselves (or assemble themselves without any design) around highways and cars.

For industrial countries, the reform of such policies - and implementation of alternatives - will be a very expensive and arduous long-term transformation because their sprawling, resource-devouring infrastructure is already in place. Most developing countries have not yet incurred such costs, but the stakes there are higher. On one hand, if they model themselves on a heavily car-dependent transport system like that of the United States, they will be repeating the same mistakes many industrial countries made decades ago, which left them stuck with heavy environmental and economic losses. On the other hand, developing countries now have an opportunity that the industrial world no longer has - to leapfrog the crippling effects of automobile transport and go more directly to an enlightened future than what could now be possible in a city like Los Angeles, from which much of the car-dream originally came.

An essential goal for developing countries, then, is to balance the established demands of economy, ecology, and personal aspiration in a way that bypasses, rather than simply mitigates, the paralysis of car-dominated development. This can be achieved by investing in community designs that allow for easy access to schools, work, and shopping by public transit, bicycling, and walking.

Public transit is a far better investment than the subsidizing of auto transport, particularly for the world's most populous and congested urban areas; because buses and trains use space and energy more efficiently than cars do. A two-track rail line, for example, can carry the same number of people as 16 lanes of highway over a one-hour period. Similarly, a subway train uses 1,100 Btu to move a passenger one kilometer - only one-sixth the energy required by an automobile with one passenger. Besides transporting greater numbers of people per gallon of fuel, public transport also emits less pollution per person than an automobile. And while public transit can be the backbone of a balanced transport system, bicycling and walking play complementary roles by providing the convenience of individual mobility.

Under this balanced transport system, the automobile would not become obsolete, but would no longer dominate. As in the case of the couple from Beijing, who bought their car to drive out of town on weekends, many people in developing countries would continue riding their bicycles or taking public transport to work, but use their cars for longer distances. Vendelin Vodicka, a resident of Prague, explains: "I don't use [my car] for work. If somebody likes driving around for half an hour looking for a parking space, fine. I'll take the tram."

What developing countries need to be aiming for is not the dream of a car for every family, but the reality of a balanced transportation system, examples of which, though few, do exist both in the industrial and the developing countries. The Dutch town of Groningen, for example, banned cars from the city center last year, and since then, 60 percent of all journeys have been made by bicycles. Business is booming, countering the fears of town planners and shopkeepers, and daily life continues but without the pollution, noise and congestion of the car-dominated days.

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the city of Curitiba, Brazil, a revolutionary public transport system serves a population of close to 2 million people. This system is the result of a 20-year effort that integrated land use and transportation planning, and involved the designation of a hierarchy of roads. The result is an efficient, rapid, affordable, and modern public transport system involving express busways, circular inter-district bus routes, and tubes that allow rapid bus passengers to board more quickly, making cars unnecessary (or relatively expensive and inconvenient for those who still want to use them) for daily transport needs. These are the examples that the developing world's cities need to model themselves on - not the choking freeways of Los Angeles.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

American Automobile Manufacturers Association (AAMA), World Motor Vehicle Data, 1995 Edition, (Detroit, MI: AAMA, 1995).

James J. Mackenzie, Roger C. Dower, Donald D.T. Chen, The Going Rate: What It Really Costs to Drive, (Washington, D.C.: World Resources Institute, 1992).

International Road Federation (IRF), World Road Statistics 1989-1993, (Geneva, Switzerland: IRF, 1994).

Jonas Rabinovitch, "Urban Public Transport Management in Curitiba, Brazil," Industry and Environment, Vol. 16, No. 1-2, January-June 1993.

United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Industry and Environment, Energy Savings in the Transport Sector, Technical Report No. 25, (Paris: UNEP, 1994).

RELATED ARTICLE: A CHECKLIST OF POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

1 Avoid overinvesting in auto industry and infrastructure at the expense of public transport. Public transport is a better alternative for developing and developed countries alike because it moves more people with less space, energy, and pollution.

2 Tax automobiles, automotive fuels, and highways so as to internalize the hidden costs of automobile transport borne by society at large, such as air pollution, public health effects, and climate change. The revenues from these taxes can be used to finance new public transport projects and revitalize existing ones.

3 Invest in planning high-density urban centers that allow people to live, work, and shop within a short distance. This will reduce reliance on automobiles.

Odil Tunali is a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute.