China Doing Something

In a clear move to try and deflect a lot of the negative press they have been getting, the Chinese government is "urging" that people in 108 cities refrain from driving their cars for a full week, with emphasis put on Sept. 22nd or "No Car Day" where they will open lanes of road for bikes or other alternate vehicles according to chinadaily.com. They say this will save 33 million litres of gas and cut emissions by 3000 tons on the "No Car Day." The goal, it says, is to increase the use of public transportation, which is already apparently at 50%. First off, I think this is a pretty cool Idea and really wish some cities locally would give something like this a shot. Secondly, I agree with the assertion that public transport is very important and really an absolute necessity for a city above a certain population to function. More money must be spent worldwide on creating a reliable, safe, cheap, clean and convenient public transportation systems in as many cities as we can. There really are a relatively small amount of cities that have public transportation that would be classified as good. But, how much capacity do these systems in China really have? This isn't a small population we are talking about here, and you can't just push people towards public transport if the system isn't actually in place in a useful form with enough copacity to handle that many people. I know nothing about China's public transportation systems, so I am just hypothesizing here, but when it comes down to it, I don't know how much a campaign like this is really going to accomplish. My guess is that they get some people to ride a bike, or ride the train for a week, and they will immediately go right back to what they had always been doing, but it gets people talking and thinking about emissions and energy use, so that's good. None of that really changes the fact that the whole thing just really stinks of a strategy to counteract all of the recent press, and calls into question their true commitment to these sorts of policies.