City Skyline

One way to reduce car use? Fill your city with traffic

Where’s the worst traffic in the world? There are various lists, such as this one, which puts London ninth and Sao Paulo in Brazil top of the world’s congested cities.

The majority of such lists concentrate on European and North American cities – Belgium and the Netherlands feature as the traffic hellholes they are; that particular list includes only Brussels, but Antwerp and Rotterdam pop up regularly in many others.

But widespread car ownership, and providing the infrastructure to deal with it, has been a reality for most of those cities for many decades. And even the other cities regularly cited – such as Mexico City, Shanghai, Beijing, Bangkok, Johannesburg and Tokyo – have had sophisticated traffic systems for years, even if they sometimes struggle to cope with the demand.

This article, however, nominates Dhaka in Bangladesh, pointing out that practically no adequate infrastructure exists to cope with the demands of the population. In other cities, such as Cairo, drivers simply pay very little attention to traffic signals or right of way, with predictably chaotic results.

Trends in developed nations, however, may suggest that the previous dominance of Western cities in the bad traffic charts is faltering. It could even be that the worst of the traffic jams experienced by European and American drivers are behind us, and that many cities are gradually becoming less congested. A report for the UK government , for example, found that traffic on urban minor and A roads had fallen, though overall traffic is still rising slightly.

The tricky task is to work out why car use has fallen, given that UK cities have more sophisticated traffic management, much better infrastructure, wealthier citizens, more of whom own or could own cars, and – how shall we put it? – rather less freeform driving habits than developing nations. And the answer may just be that while more car ownership, as in China, leads to congestion, more congestion may eventually lead to less car use.

There are, of course, many other factors: the size of the city, the availability of reliable and affordable public transport networks, provision for cyclists, the ease with which you can park, and so on. There is, however, one shining example of a city which always makes it into the lists of the worst places to drive: New York City. And it is, probably not coincidentally, the only major city in North America where more than half of households do not own a car.

 

 

 

 

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