China on the road to auto-dominated future

China is building the entire country around the automobile — making the same mistakes the US made in the last century only faster, warns urbanist Peter Calthorpe in a startling Foreign Policy article. China will pay in social costs and pollution, and the world will pay in carbon emissions, argues Calthorpe, who completed numerous designs in China, including a low-carbon plan for the nation. "In the last five years, China has built 20,000 miles of expressways, finishing the construction of 12 national highways a whopping 13 years ahead of schedule and at a pace four times faster than the United States built its interstate highway system," he says. Like the US cities of the 1950s and 1960s, he writes, Chinese cities are working to accommodate the explosive growth of automobile travel by building highways, ring roads, and parking lots. Consequently, auto use has risen sixfold in Beijing since 1986, "while bike use has dropped from nearly 60 percent of trips to just 17 percent in 2010." Many high-ranking officials are aware that China needs to move in a more sustainable direction, he says. But because things are moving so fast, "China's leaders have a limited window of opportunity to plan for prosperous, livable, low-carbon cities."

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