How To Alleviate China’s Traffic Congestion
As our economy grows at a fever pitch, and more and more people are moving into the major cities and industrial centers, traffic congestion becomes the order of the day.Traffic congestion not only creates headaches for commuters, but also reduces productivity by taking away valuable time from work. This sickness that plagues our cities must be at least put under control, if not cured.
Some people advocate that more roads be built to accommodate the increase in traffic, others think that enlarging the capacity of public transit systems: buses, subway, trains…is the answer.
Building more roads would mean a lot of land will be appropriated—not a very good prospect for economic, agricultural, and environmental reasons. On the other hand, forcing everyone to take public transit will bring inconvenience to those whose use of their cars is essential to their work. Putting more buses on the road may have the opposite effect as big buses tend to clog up narrow streets. Building an extensive subway system can be the ideal answer, but that is very expensive.
Clearly, we cannot go for one single solution. A compromise must be struck between the different solutions. My personal view is that for cities that have plenty of unused land, more roads should be built. Having special lanes reserved for bicycles and motorcycles should encourage more people to use bicycles and motorcycles instead of cars. As a long-term solution, extensive subway, or surface monorail systems should be built for all the major cities