When poor people occupy land without paying, it’s squatting. When the rich do it, it’s parking
An extract from Daniel Knowles’ new book “Carmageddon”.
Hi everyone, it’s Jonn here. I remain for the moment indisposed so we’re continuing our run of guest posts. Today: an extract from Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It, by the Economist’s excellent Midwest correspondent Daniel Knowles.
If you want to get a sense of where the car is coming for next, Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) is a good place to start. Mumbai, I strongly suspect, is probably one of the most stressful places to drive on Earth. I do not say this from personal experience, or not exactly. I was based in Mumbai in 2018 and 2019, as The Economist’s correspondent, but I never once sat behind the wheel of a car in my time living and working in the city. That is because, as most Western firms do for their expatriate workers in India, The Economist employed a driver for me. His name was Govind, and he was one of the loveliest men I have ever worked with anywhere.
But I can speak about what it looked like from the passenger seat. Driving in Mumbai means navigating almost constant traffic, which consists not only of cars and buses, but also rickshaws, men pulling carts, motorcyclists, cyclists, pedestrians, and even the occasional herd of emaciated cows being gently led through the heart of the city. At all times in most of the city, there is the sound of car horns as drivers try to negotiate their way through, with varying degrees of aggression. Traffic lights are unreliable, and instead police officers man most intersections, blasting on whistles as vehicles weave around them. The roads are full of potholes, and during the monsoon season, which lasts typically from June until late August, the streets can often flood several feet deep, making them invisible to the motorists. Stranded vehicles with flooded engines are a relatively common sight.
And yet it wasn’t always like this. When you travel down what is Mumbai’s most iconic route, Marine Drive, a two-mile promenade that Salman Rushdie described as “a glittering art deco sweep” of which “not even Rome could boast,” it is now invariably thick with cars of all sorts. But whenever we drove on it, Govind would remark about how, when he started out as a driver in the early 1990s, the roads were clear. Until the 1990s the only cars you could get in India were the Hindustan Ambassadors, which were based on a British design from the 1950s, the Morris Oxford Series III, and manufactured in a plant near Kolkata (formerly Calcutta). Foreign imports were mostly banned. Car ownership was tiny—there was one vehicle on average for every 200 people.
By the early 1990s, however, India began to open up its economy. And in the 2000s, it went into overdrive. Now, even Indians on relatively modest incomes can get loans to buy vehicles. From 2009 to 2019, the number of vehicles in India as a whole tripled. The biggest sellers have been motorbikes. But cars are following closely behind. In 1981, Mumbai had only 320,000 registered cars on its roads. It took until 2000 to reach one million. By 2018, the figure had passed three million.
And what is happening? The government, seeing the roads jammed up with cars, has decided much as European and American ones did in the 1950s and ’60s that they have to accommodate them. Even though most Mumbaikers cannot afford cars, many of the biggest transport projects in Mumbai, such as the Sea Link, a motorway on stilts that runs from near my old home in Bandra to Worli, in the city’s former mill district, are built for them. It is an illustration of how exactly the same sorts of mistakes that were made generations ago in the West are being made again.
In fact, the leaders of the state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, are so proud of the Sea Link that they are building another, farther north from the original, from Andheri, a suburb north of Bandra. The idea is that they will connect to form part of a new “Coastal Road,” an eight-lane motorway proposed to travel along much of Mumbai’s western seafront. Computer renderings show a plan that looks not unlike the Katy Freeway in Houston. That is, enormous elevated roads with thousands of cars zooming along it, and enormous curving interchanges, running for twenty-three kilometres. If it looks a little like an American project from the 1960s, that is no coincidence. The original idea was proposed by an American transport consultancy, Wilbur Smith Associates, in 1962.
According to Reuben Abraham, a native Mumbaikar who runs the IDFC Institute, a think tank with bases in Mumbai and London, in a city like Mumbai: “the most widely used form of transportation are actually your legs. Most people walk. In some form or fashion. And yet if you look at how the city is being built out, it is as though the primary form of transportation is actually cars.” The reason, he says, is “the classic Mancur Olsen problem.” Mancur Olsen was an American political scientist who wrote about how exploitative governments arise. That is, in short, “a powerful organised minority will always trump the interests of the majority.” And the powerful minority wants cars. In Mumbai, car owners act with almost total impunity. When poor people occupy land without paying for it, Abraham jokes, “It’s called squatting, when the rich do the same thing, it’s called parking.”
You can find similar stories all over the world. In Nairobi, an enormous new bypass has been constructed with funding from China’s EXIM Bank, as part of a project to create a new ring road to the city and motorways into its centre. Most poorer countries seem unable to stop the growth in cars. Indeed, they do not want to stop the growth. What is bad for society as a whole can still be good for individuals. If you are a young professional in a city such as Lagos or Jakarta or Delhi, it still makes sense to buy your own vehicle if you can afford it, because the alternatives are so utterly awful and local leadership has no interest in investing in them. So the number of vehicles on the road proliferates.
If you look at middle-income countries—places like Brazil, South Africa, or Indonesia—they all have cities that are as congested as Mumbai. And their economies are stagnant. In São Paulo, the financial capital of Brazil, the traffic is so bad that many of the richest get around by helicopter. The city has 500 helipads and a fleet of around 700 helicopters, the biggest in the world. Ordinary people, who now own almost half as many cars as Americans, spend their days stuck in traffic. São Paulo has the world’s second longest commuting times, with drivers spending an average of forty-three minutes each way getting to work and public transport users well over an hour. A huge amount of economic growth has been squandered, with the extra income that people are earning being spent on sitting in traffic on ever-more polluted roads.
A map of PMI 2.5 levels worldwide—that is, the tiniest sort of soot particles that can penetrate deeply into a human being’s lungs—shows that they are highest almost entirely in the poorest countries. But even in rich countries, because air pollution kills slowly, not quickly, it is easy to ignore. The cars that ply the streets of cities such as Kinshasa or Yangon are not the relatively clean, efficient, modern vehicles you get in Paris or New York. They are generally cars abandoned by western consumers years or even decades ago, and exported to poorer countries where things like safety inspections and pollution rules are less onerous.
According to the International Energy Agency, in 2019, there were 1.4 billion cars on the roads worldwide. If the world matched American levels of car ownership, that would grow to more than eight billion. If you assume that most of them would be powered by petrol or diesel, CO2 emissions just from transport would increase by at least three times the deeply unsustainable levels the entire global economy produces already. Even if you imagine that they will be powered by electricity, where will it be generated? Solar and wind are growing, of course. But the biggest fuel for electricity in most of the developing world is still coal. And those countries have enough energy needs already without adding millions of electric vehicles to their grids.
Right now, the rich world is proposing to replace internal combustion engine cars with electric ones. The idea is that by taking our old petrol burners off the road, we will fix climate change. But actually it doesn’t work like that. The petrol burners are not taken off the road – they reappear, on roads elsewhere, in a poorer country. Somewhere like Mumbai.
“Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It” is available now from Abrams Books.