Which city has the world’s worst traffic? It’s a tough question, as cities like Sao Paulo, Cairo, Mumbai, and Los Angeles compete neck and neck for the world’s worst bottlenecks. But Time Magazine thinks it has found its answer in Bangkok, dubbing Thailand’s megacity “The Capital of Gridlock.” Hannah Beech, the author of the Time news story, explains just how bad traffic can get, writing that, “Police don’t consider traffic bad until a car is stationary for at least an hour. Really bad is two hours.”
Overall, Ms. Beech does a tremendous job covering the wide range of problems connected to Bangkok’s traffic congestion:
The human side: “Traffic in Thailand’s capital snarls with such ferocity that hundreds of women over the past few years have been forced to give birth in cars.” Police are now trained in midwifery, she reports.
The economic side: “More than $1 billion in productivity is lost every year to traffic jams.”
The environmental side: In the 1970’s Bangkok cemented over canals to build more streets for the growing number of cars. “…the declining number of canals, which once served as reservoirs for rain, means that substantial portions of the city flood during the five-month-long wet season. The rising water invariably short-circuits traffic lights, turning intersections into free-for-alls.” Read the rest of this entry »
Soy beans on the left, and corn, on the right, are being used for bio-fuel. Photo by cindy47452.
Today, Brenda Gorman reports in the New York Times about a rash of cases involving the bio-fuels industry in which industrial waste is improperly disposed, fouling rivers and streams in states like Alabama and Missouri. The title of her article suggests the internal contradictions of a purportedly green business that harms the environment: “Pollution Is Called a Byproduct of a ‘Clean’ Fuel.” As Ms. Gorman writes,
The discharges [from the bio-fuel plants], which can be hazardous to birds and fish, have many people scratching their heads over the seeming incongruity of pollution from an industry that sells products with the promise of blue skies and clear streams.
China’s Green Beat, is a neat bilingual blog I stumbled upon the other day, written by John Romankiewicz, an American Fulbright scholar currently living in Beijing, and Zhao Xiangyu, a Chinese citizen from Heilongjiang, a province in the northern part of the country. Check out the above video for a comical take on serious challenge: motorization in the Chinese capital.
Congestion pricing is good for the environment and public health. Photo by dlisbona.
A team of scientists at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and King’s College London conducted a study showing that London’s congestion pricing scheme has reduced air pollution in central London, saving Londoners as a whole 1888 extra years of life. The study focused on two types of pollutants from cars: NO2, a chemical compound known to cause acute and chronic bronchitis, and particulate matter (PM10), tiny particles suspended in the air which can become embedded in the lungs, causing asthma and bronchitis.
The authors of the study, which was published in the journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, are hardly sanguine about their results, noting that overall London saw only “modest” reductions in NO2 and PM10 levels. However, they also point out that, “Absolute and relative reductions in NO2 and PM10 were greatest within the congestion charging zone wards,” suggesting that an expansion of the zone would have an even greater environmental and health impact. Read the rest of this entry »
Residents of Mexico City have a much poorer sense of smell than their counterparts in the neighboring state of Tlaxcala due, in large part, to the poorer air quality in the Mexican capital. A study by Robyn Hudson, Aline Arriola, Margarita Martinez, and Hans Distel - researchers at UNAM, Mexico’s national university - suggests that the cause is exposure to abnormally high levels of ozone, a chemical compound known to damage the olfactory mucosa, the part of the nose that allows odors to be detected.
“For a megacommunity like Mexico City with more than 20 million inhabitants, this could constitute an important public health issue,” the researchers wrote. The study notes that chilangos, as residents of Mexico City affectionately refer to themselves, had more difficultly identifying trace smells of coffee and orange juice than people who live in neighboring Tlaxcala. What’s more, they had more trouble differentiating between two traditional Mexican drinks, horchata and atole.
“We clearly want to move into a much stronger system of public transport in order to avoid excessive dependence on individualized forms of transport, which are both energy using and emission generating,'’ Montek Singh Ahluwalia, head of India’s Planning Commission, said today. His comments came just one day after a speech by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh saying that India may “overhaul” its public transportation system
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaking at Regional Planning Association annual meeting. Photo by Ethan Arpi.
In The World In 2008 - a supplement to the Economist - Mayor Bloomberg outlines some of the aims and inspirations for his super-ambitious PLANYC, a city-led initiative to convert New York City into one of the greenest mass human developments on earth. Mayor Bloomberg’s Plan, like New York City itself, is a postmodern mash-up with ideas and inspirations taken from cities around the world. In the Mayor’s own words:
In developing the climate-change strategies that underpin PlanNYC, we drew on the experiences of Berlin for our renewable-energy and green-roof policies; Hong Kong, Shanghai and Delhi for our innovative transit improvements; Copenhagen for our pedestrian and cycling upgrades; Chicagoand Los Angeles for our plan to plant 1m more trees; Amsterdam and Tokyo for our transit-oriented development policies; and Bogotá for our plans for Bus Rapid Transit.
There’s an interesting story behind many of Bloomberg’s proposals; they come from cities in the developing world, places where municipal funds are hard to come by so every project must be constructed carefully for it to succeed. Another interesting point is that city leaders are increasingly communicating with each other, exchanging ideas and success so that they can be replicated throughout the world.
A miasma of soot and smog sits over Beijing. Photo by +212.
“Should I run behind a bus and breathe in the exhaust? Should I train on the highway during rush hour? Is there any way to acclimate myself to pollution?” These are just a sampling of the strange questions that exercise physiologist for the United States Olympic Committee Randy Wilber has fielded from American athletes anxious to turn out a top-notch performance in Beijing this August, according to a recent New York Times article.
According to Chinese officials, such worries are unfounded. They believe that Beijing will boast blue skies during this summer’s Olympics, when China will openly flex its superpower muscles for the entire world to admire. Unfortunately, Beijing’s plans for creating blue skies rely on a tremendous, temporary green washing of the city – drastic limits on vehicle use and factory closings.
The New York Times article points out that pollution levels in Beijing typically reach five times the World Health Organization standards for safety. Athletes competing in Olympic test events last summer reported contracting respiratory infections and coughing up black mucus. If China’s temporary fixes don’t produce blue skies in Beijing, athletes’ bodies’ may react to extreme air pollution levels by reducing air intake, leading to oxygen debt and cramps. Athletes may also experience allergic reactions. In the worst-case scenario, extreme pollution may lead to heart attacks in even the fittest of athletes. Read the rest of this entry »
In this great ad from MTV a donkey named Lolo takes the bus. The caption says “If Lolo can save the planet, why can’t you? Leave the car and take public transit. Let’s stop global warming.”
The car industry’s total annual advertising expenditures for the US alone were $16.3 billion in 2006 according to media research firm TNS Media Intelligence. In the face of this barrage of automobile advertising, it’s nice to see some time, money, and creativity invested in well done TV spots promoting public transportation. I’d love to see more of this. If anybody has any more examples of this kind of messaging please post them here or send them to me at rthom[at]wri[dot]org.
Way to go MTV! Check out the campaign at mtvswitch.org.
Angel Hsu, a colleague of mine who travels quite a bit to China to promote the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, an accounting tool used for measuring greenhouse gases, sent me an email today after checking the weather in Beijing on the weather channel, to tell me that a new word has entered the weather lexicon: smoke!
Going nowhere fast in Bangkok. Photo by pchweat.
Soy beans on the left, and corn, on the right, are being used for bio-fuel. Photo by 
Congestion pricing is good for the environment and public health. Photo by 
Smog in the city. Photo by 
A view of Hyderabad. Photo by 
A miasma of soot and smog sits over Beijing. Photo by 
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