It's Easy to Love the Environment if You Already Own a Car

A gentleman from Taiwan told me this joke:

Two men, one from China and one from America, were classmates at Berkley back in the 1960's. Twenty years later, they were both successful businessmen in their home countries. China at this time was just starting to really open up, so the Chinese man invited his old friend to come visit.

The two had both been on the cross-country team at college, so on the first morning they decided to go for a run together, like in old times. They ran about 3 miles, and as they were catching their breath after the American says: "Wow, the roads are filled with nothing but bicyclists. I thought we were poor people on the South Side of Chicago... but these people here are so poor they can't even afford to buy a car."

The Chinese friend says: "Oh yeah? as we were running I overheard two of those bicyclists talking to each other. As they passed us, the one pointed at us and says to the other, 'I thought we were poor...but I don't feel so bad anymore.  Those two guys are so poor they can't even afford a bike!'"

I'm not allowed to drive in China, so I've been walking to work every day since I've been here. It's about a 50 minute walk each way. But it's good....I get my 5000 steps in each day and also get some quality IPOD time. Besides, there is no better way to get to know a place than to wander it on foot. Each trip, I try to take a different path.

So for me, being able to walk to work is an enjoyable novelty after 30 years of doing it in a car every day. The weather has been grey, damp, and chilly. But as long as it's not pouring down rain it's great walking weather.

And believe me, I'm not lonely on foot. Even though the roads are crowded with cars, the bike lanes are just as crowded with cyclists and the sidewalks with footists.  The Industrial Park, being so new, was laid out to be friendly to all modes of transport. Each road has at least two lanes going each way for the cars, and another two lanes going each way for the cycles. and then wide sidewalks on both sides of the street. If you get into the old city of Suzhou, though, you get a taste of what it used to be....with cars and cycles and pedestrians often sharing the same spaces.

Like most Americans age 40 or older, I saw my first non-history-book images of China when Nixon took his trip to Beijing back in the 1970s. In the newscasts, the roads of China seemed to be filled with nothing but bicycles and bicyclists wearing their blue uniforms and Mao caps. The gentleman from Taiwan....the one who told me the joke...said that it really was this way when he first started coming to the mainland back in the 1980s. The few cars you saw back then belonged to government officials (all Buicks, but that is a story for another time) or to the very few wealthy who were surfing high on the initial waves of capitalism.

It's only been within the last 10 years or so that cars have become the norm. It took a while after the initial opening up of the economy to develop a middle-class with the affluence to buy cars. And it's not like everybody has a car now. There is still a lot of car buying to be done.

China today seems similar to what my parents and their generation describe the late 1940s and 1950s to have been. At that time, you had all these people that grew up poor in during the great depression. These were folks who had been humping it to survive during the poverty of the depression and the hardships during the world war. Then all of a sudden after the war, people saw the economy boom and most saw their own lives improve, if not prosper. New housing sprang up in new places. New roads were built to those new places. And people began to afford cars so that every family had one. And many families began having two.

I think maybe that China now is a bit like the US circa 1950. Housing is booming as is road and infrastructure construction. People are buying cars, often for the first time. Not these little Smart Cars and two seaters that are so European. We're talking BIG cars...four door BMWs, SUVs, Mini-vans and the like. If you look at a parking lot in Suzhou, it would be difficult to tell the difference between it and one in Houston.

And I can't blame them for buying cars. I've been walking to work for 4 weeks and it's a novelty to me. If it's raining or cold, I can afford to take a taxi. But if I'd been humping it on foot for 20 or 30 or 40 years an all the weather, then I'm sure the novelty would have worn off long ago. Also, I've come to realize that if your two feet are your only means of transport then your whole world is reduced to a circle with a diameter of 2 miles, maybe 3 miles. And that's a small world. A very cold world during the winter. A very hot one in the summer. A very wet world from time to time.

To a person on foot, a bicycle is like a gift from the heavens. I figure a bike instantly increases the distance you can travel by a factor of 5. Even more if you get an electric scooter (which these days is actually the two-wheeled vehicle of choice, as shown in the photo at top). With a bike, your world becomes a circle of 10 to 15 miles in radius. Through the magic of pi-r-squared, that is almost infinitely bigger than the world on foot. But it still can be hot, and cold, and wet. Just as on foot, you can't carry a week's worth of groceries on your bike (though I've seen a lot of Chinese trying to).

No...a car is a wonderful thing. If it's raining, you don't have to put on your poncho and drape the front of it over your handlebars. If it's freezing, you don't have to put your coat on backwards to protect yourself from the wind. It may be a pain to change a flat tire on a car, but it's far less painful than walking two miles on an arthritic hip.

Several folks I know from work, mostly women, have gotten a car and begun driving only in the last 12 to 24 months. At the age of 35 of so. If you ask them what they did prior to that, the answer is either walk or ride a bike or ride the bus. To them, the car is more than just transportation. It gives them back an extra 1 to 2 hours per day in which they don't have to plod along as pedestrian or pedalist or fight the public transit system. It gives back even more time when they pack the trunk with groceries once a week, rather than lugging one or two bags from the market daily.

The Chinese have fallen in love with the automobile for all the same reasons that Americans did back in the 1950s. It's not transportation. It's quality of life. It's all the benefits described above plus all the others. Taking your kids to soccer practice after work. Getting quickly to the hospital when your newborn is running a high fever at 2 in the morning. Doing a family day-trip on the week-end to an amusement park 50 miles away.

Every now and then I see an article in some newspaper or magazine bemoaning the fact that so many cars are being sold (and will be sold) in China and India and other emerging markets. It's bad for the environment... more pollution and CO2 emissions and more demand to drill for oil. The stories usually come with a complaint that modernity is spoiling the natural way of life that people have lived for centuries. And that the people would be happy to continue to live that way if only the greedy capitalists would stop their seductive marketing.

Maybe it is a strain on the environment.  Maybe so.  But after 4 weeks of  humping it across Suzhou on foot, I won't begrudge anyone an automobile in this country or in any other.