When officials drew up the blueprints for the redesign of this city in the early 1980s, nary a skyscraper punctuated the low-slung horizon, the buildings of which mostly dated from the decades of Western control early in the last century.
The hugely ambitious plans called for Shanghai to be built anew. And among the top priorities in a city previously dominated by bicycles was avoiding the most common plagues of the automobile age -- unmanageable traffic and unbearable pollution.
To that end, enormous sums were spent on spectacular bridges, elevated highways and a brand-new subway system. But today, glance out the window of one of this city's 3,000 high-rises at around 6pm, when snarling masses of honking cars tend to congeal in gridlock, and it is hard to escape the impression that Shanghai, at least for now, is plagued nevertheless.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
As people in Shanghai have grown more and more affluent, they have displayed a US-style passion for the automobile. Getting rich and growing attached to cars have increasingly gone hand in hand, and they have produced disturbing side effects familiar in cities that have long been addicted to automobiles -- from filthy air and stressful, marathon commutes to sharply rising oil consumption.
China accounts for about 12 percent of the world's energy demand, but its consumption is growing at more than four times the global rate, sending Chinese oil executives on an increasingly frantic search for overseas supplies. Top environmental officials have warned of ecological and economic doom if China continues to follow this pattern. But in cities like frequently smog-bound Shanghai, where automobiles account for 70 to 80 percent of air pollution, nothing seems capable of stopping, or even slowing, the rapid rise of a car culture.
This is not for lack of trying. In one attempt to slow the growth of traffic that has produced much grumbling, the city has raised the fees for car registrations every year since 2000, doubling them over that time to about US$4,600 per vehicle -- more than twice the city's per capita income. Many drivers try to get around expensive measures by illegally registering their cars in other cities, where the fees are much lower, and the result is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with the Shanghai traffic police.
The traffic efforts have been coupled with a major expansion of the public transportation system.
The steep growth in automobile traffic, however, seems to mock the city's efforts. The original blueprints for a major expansion of Shanghai's road network, drawn up two decades ago, predicted that Shanghai would pass the threshold of 2 million cars in 2020. In fact, that figure was reached last November.
"The estimates we made 20 years ago have been proven wrong," said Li Junhao (李俊豪), chief engineer of the city's Urban Planning Administration Bureau, in something of an understatement. "The development of Shanghai has been beyond our imagination."
Even interim traffic estimates here have fallen far short. Two years ago, the city government rushed orders for the construction of a new, elevated loop expressway for central Shanghai, because other elevated expressways were already saturated at peak hours.
"Just one year after some roads were completed, they reached vehicle flow volumes that were forecast for 15 to 20 years from now," said Yang Dongyuan (
Meanwhile, the city is expanding its subway grid well beyond the 507km of track first planned. Two new lines are being added to the original 15, along with another 309km of track. Even so, the subway system, gleaming and clean though it is, is one area where traffic has failed to meet projections, with less than half the expected ridership on some lines. The reason, experts say, is that there are not enough trains, which results in overcrowding, and further encourages people to ride in cars.
To be sure, Shanghai's failure to master the challenge of the automobile reflects a mixture of forces, both economic and cultural. Foremost is the city's economic performance and has outstripped even the most optimistic projections. Add to this a flourishing consumer culture that equates car ownership, however costly, with personal freedom, prestige and success.
In this regard, Yu Qiang, a 31-year-old salesman, is a model citizen of sorts. Yu spent more than US$20,000 last year to buy his first car, a Chinese-made Buick, so that he could drive to work .
Because of heavy traffic, the 11km commute usually takes an hour, which includes dropping his son off at kindergarten and his wife, who teaches, at her school.
"A new subway line will be completed to my neighborhood later this year and I'm hoping many other people will ride it so that the traffic will get better," Yu said. "I'll keep driving my car, though. It's more comfortable because I can listen to music, use the air conditioner and it's not crowded."
Yu then made a comment that sounded like a city planner's nightmare and a car salesman's dream.
"In China, everybody wants to have a car, and I'm just one of them," he said.
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