The Facts
new internationalist
issue 195 - May 1989
Building more roads does not ease traffic congestion. The usual result is that more new cars are built to fill the new highways. Traffic has now reached nightmarish proportions in many cities.
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There are around 400 million cars currently in use around the world. Most are in the industrialized countries. The US, Canada, Europe and Japan account for 16% of the globe's population but those countries produce 88% of all cars and own 81% of them. About 1% of people in the Third World own a car compared with 40% of people in the West.4
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Cars harness only 10-20% of the potential, energy in their fuel. The rest is converted to pollutants and heat. Controls have reduced some emissions (notably lead) but overall pollution continues to increase as more cars travel more miles.
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Transport policy in most developing nations is skewed towards the need of the car-owning elite. Public transport is downgraded and many human-powered vehicles like trishaws, rickshaws and bicycles are dismissed as inferior.
1 Motor Vehicle Manufacturers Association (MMVA), Facts and Figures, various years. |
This article is from
the May 1989 issue
of New Internationalist.
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