"Car Society" Serial 4: How Many Cars China Can Hold

(This article is an excerpt from the first section of "Car Society Can't Surpass the Limits of the Environment" in "Car Society". "How many cars the Chinese land can hold")

Chapter II: Automobile Society Cannot Exceed Environmental Limits In 2006, China's auto market continued to maintain strong growth, and the sedans became the main driving force for driving automobile sales. At present, the proportion of private purchases of cars has increased to around 77%. In 2006, sales of new vehicles including passenger cars and commercial vehicles in China both exceeded 7 million, and China surpassed Japan for the first time to become the second largest new car sales market in the world. Experts expect that in 2010 China's new car sales will reach 10 million, and in 2020 will reach 20 million.

According to the Statistical Communique on National Economic and Social Development released by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2006, as the number of cars entering the family continues to accelerate, by the end of 2006, the number of private cars in the country reached 11.49 million, an increase of 33.5% over the previous year's 8.6667 million. . As of the end of 2006, the number of civilian vehicles in the country reached 49.85 million vehicles, an increase of 15.2% over the end of the previous year, of which private vehicle ownership was 29.25 million, an increase of 23.7%.

However, with the rapid expansion of the automobile society, China's already "tightened" environmental sustainability is becoming more and more vulnerable.

For example, in major cities in China, the parking of motor vehicles is very serious. Whether it is a street or an alley, the parking lanes lined up along the roadside can be seen everywhere, and the already uncrowded road surface is even more unsmooth. An expert on transportation problems at Tsinghua University once worried that if the current growth rate of motor vehicles is to be reached, by 2015, all major and medium-sized cities in China will be on roads and cars will be parked.

For another example, in Beijing, the city that is about to host the Olympics, the “atmosphere environment”, an invisible, intangible “indicator,” is being placed under a microscope by environmental experts, government officials, every Beijing citizen and even tourists. The most enthusiastic attention. Recent studies show that due to the rapid growth of urban motor vehicles in China, urban air pollution is changing from soot-type pollution to soot-motor vehicle hybrid pollution, resulting in frequent occurrence of haze in some large and medium-sized cities, causing many problems. The number of haze days in Beijing has increased from more than 10 days in 2001 to more than 40 days in 2006.

The relentless reality warned us that China’s automobile society cannot expand beyond its national conditions and without limits. Whether it is the administrator of a government department or the constituent of the automobile society, it should seriously consider: How large is the environmental limit that supports China’s automobile society?

Section I: How Many Cars in China's Land Can Accept Social Background Sketch:

On October 24, 2005, the car parking fees in Shenzhen were significantly adjusted after extensive consultation, and the parking fees for private cars increased by RMB 186 per month. After the policy adjustment, the comprehensive price increase rate is about 35%.

Relevant leaders in Shenzhen indicated that the adjustment of parking fees is one of the measures for solving traffic congestion in Shenzhen. After calculation by the traffic simulation system of the traffic control department, the adjustment of parking fees will ease the traffic flow in the central area during peak hours. At the same time, 70% of the city’s overall increase in parking fee income is received by the government, which is earmarked by the financial department for the development of public transportation. According to reports, Shenzhen's management idea for private cars is "regulating demand and guiding consumption."

In Shanghai, another big city in China, people must first photograph one of the world’s most expensive aluminum license plates before they buy a car. All of this proves that the expansion of China's automobile society must first obey the land, the most scarce resource.

Leicester, United States? R? Brown's "Model B" pointed out that in the industrialized world, people have already laid roads and parking lots on millions of hectares of arable land. In the United States, for example, an average of 0.07 hectares of road and parking space is required for each car. Therefore, for every five additional cars in the United States, the size of a football field must be covered with asphalt. Flat and well-drained land is suitable for farming, but it is also an ideal choice for road construction. Therefore, farmland will often become the road.

In 2004, the United States had 240 million cars. There have been 6.3 million kilometers of roads laid, enough to surround the Earth's equator 157 laps. In addition to roads, cars also require parking spaces. Imagine the scale of the parking lot where more than 200 million cars and trucks are parked! The area of ​​land used for roads and parking lots in the United States is estimated to be 16 million hectares, which is almost the same as the amount of arable land that US farmers use to grow wheat. However, in various industrial countries, this occupation of land is slowing as the ownership of automobiles tends to become saturated. In the United States, almost everyone has a car on average, while in Western European countries it is generally two cars. Of the total 531 million vehicles in the world, 11 million new cars are added every year to more and more developing countries. This means that in countries where hunger is still quite common, the battle between cars and crops has already begun on the wheat fields and rice fields. In China and India, where the total population is 2.4 billion, the consequences of such conflicts will affect food security around the world.

The densely populated automobile-centric industrial countries, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan, have an average of 0.02 hectares of roads per vehicle, and have already lost some of their best farmland. Similarly, due to the industrialization of China and India, arable land is also facing severe pressure.

If China someday reaches the ownership rate of one car per person in Japan, the total car fleet will increase to 640 million vehicles. The idea of ​​such a huge fleet seems very far away; however, we must remind ourselves that China’s steel production, grain production, and beef and mutton production have already exceeded the United States. China is a huge economy and it has been the fastest growing economy in the world since 1980.

Assuming that each motor vehicle in China has the same land area as Europe and Japan, the area of ​​640 million vehicles that need to be paved will approach 13 million hectares, and these rice fields currently produce 122 million tons of rice per year, which is the main grain of the Chinese people. .

In China, India, and other densely populated countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Mexico, there is not enough land to support the transportation system centered on private cars, but also to support their own people. The competition for land between cars and crops is becoming a competition between the rich and the poor; one side has money to buy a car and one side is desperately desperate.

Coincidentally, the article published by Japan’s “Forum of Foreign Affairs” before the monthly publication of Marubeni Economic Research Institute’s director Shibata Michio also revealed the delicate relationship between automobiles and food crops. The article said that the world's high crude oil prices will rapidly popularize bioethanol and biodiesel. As a result, the food market and energy market competition will have a chain reaction. In general, raw materials for biofuels come from sugar cane, corn, soybeans, etc., of which the most important are corn ethanol in the United States and sugar cane ethanol in Brazil.

See the car, think of the land, think of food, how many cars can China's land hold? This is a problem that must be clarified.

Nanchen observation flashback:

How much Beijing’s land can accommodate “Jing H” turns into a “qualification” - a new car with a “Jing J” prefix can already be seen on the streets of Beijing. According to relevant department statistics, the time taken for the development of automotive brands from “Beijing H” to “Jing J” was less than two years, and this “Beijing H” speed reflected the rapid growth of motor vehicles in Beijing.

The same surprising figure is that the total number of cars in Beijing reached the first one million, which took 48 years; but from 1 million to 2 million, it took only six and a half years. time. According to data from Beijing's traffic management department, Beijing has an average of 1,000 new vehicles each day, and the number of motor vehicles in the city is nearly 3 million. According to this speed, it will take a long time for Beijing's motor vehicles to break through the third One million vehicles.

The “Jing A” section had persisted for several decades, and the vast majority were very different from buses. At present, private cars have become the main driving force for the increase in the number of motor vehicles in Beijing. According to statistics from the traffic control department, the number of private motor vehicles in Beijing has exceeded 1.65 million. However, compared with the developed countries, the ownership of 1,000-person cars in big cities such as Beijing is still very low, which makes many market analysts optimistic about the prospects of the automotive market.

However, the automobile problem cannot be considered in isolation. Cars, energy and land are inseparable "iron triangles." When the number of cars suddenly soars, the two elements of land and energy are bound to become "short-board" and bear greater pressure.

In 2003, China has become the world's third largest automotive consumer market after the United States and Germany. Some experts predict that China’s auto demand will reach 5.9 million vehicles in 2005, exceeding Germany, and will exceed 10 million by 2010; it will be expected to reach 17 million by 2020. From the point of view of the auto market alone, this vast "money" scene is worth ignoring. However, from the perspective of land and energy, this set of predictions for China's auto market is converted into oil consumption demand and the demand for roads and parking lots. The hidden crisis is worthy of caution.

The authors of the book “Model B” once analyzed that in the United States, each vehicle needs an average of 0.07 hectares of roads and parking lots. The United States currently has more than 200 million motor vehicles and has laid 6.3 million kilometers of roads, enough to surround the Earth’s equator 157 laps. However, the same number of cars in China will undoubtedly be a disaster. Because China's per capita land area can not afford so many cars. Not to mention the problem of energy shortages, the dispute between cars and crops alone will be impossible to reconcile.

Of course, the standard of living of the people goes up. Buying a private car is a general trend. However, the experience of developed countries shows that the amount of sedan ownership and per capita income of citizens is not exactly proportional. For example, the per capita income of Hong Kong and Singapore in China is very high, but it is not commensurate with the number of cars owned. The reason is the relationship between the number of cars owned by a thousand people and the number of cars on the road. Experts in the industry once pointed out that the 1997 data showed that if all cars in Hong Kong were to be ranked in the same year, 273 cars would be lined up per kilometer, and there would be one car for about 3.66 meters. This is obviously the internal reason why Hong Kong has to limit the growth of private cars by taxation.

Similarly, it is not difficult to estimate how many cars the Beijing land can carry in the future and how much energy these vehicles consume each year. If the strategy of “naturalism” is followed, without any guidance or restraint on the growth of motor vehicles in Beijing, it will not be long before a car will no longer be an easy thing for ordinary people.

Under the current background of the central government's demand for accelerating the construction of a conservation-minded society, it is imperative to save energy and land. To deal with automobile consumption that is closely related to both, relevant departments must use their brains for scientific guidance and advanced planning. We must abide by the spirit of the central government and national industrial policies and vigorously guide the people to consume cars with low emissions and low emissions, and strictly limit the vehicles with large displacement and high energy consumption. In addition, it is necessary to use the means of raising emission standards and increasing parking fees in central urban areas to curb the growth of automobiles. At the same time, there must be forward-thinking in urban planning, vigorously develop a convenient public transportation system, and make the planning ideas of bus-based and private-car-assisted planning practices a reality. If the management department regards the rapid growth of car ownership as merely a construction achievement and market opportunity, it will ignore the hidden energy and land crisis behind it and lay the foundation for the sustainable development of the economy.

Land shortage, how will Beijing respond to the "parking shortage"?

If it is not Guangdong, Guangxi and other provinces with large areas of “oil shortage”, many consumers may find it difficult to profoundly appreciate the constraints of oil resources on a country’s auto consumption. But in addition to oil, there is another important factor that restricts the consumption of cars - land, such as parking spaces.

The data provided by an authoritative consulting company shows that, according to international experience, the ratio of urban motor vehicle ownership to parking spaces can reach 1:1.3, which can well meet the parking needs of motor vehicles, and the current motor vehicles in the eight districts of Beijing City. The ratio of the quantity to the number of parking berths is about 1:0.73, and the gap is very large. The Beijing Traffic Control Department predicts that the number of motor vehicles in Beijing will reach 3.5 million by 2008. According to the result of the survey of parking berths in Beijing in April 2004, this means that Beijing will need to increase the number of parking spaces to about 1,272,000 by then. Given the very tense land resources, where should Beijing's new million parking spaces need to be broken?

Sun Menglan, director of the Beijing Construction Industry Management Research Association, told reporters that according to the experience of developed countries in Europe, cars generally only move about 2 hours in 24 hours, and the remaining 22 hours are at rest. Therefore, “static traffic” is in various countries. Great attention. In the context of similarly limited land resources, European countries began exploring the technology of complete parking garages in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1990s, large-scale automatic parking garages have developed rapidly in Europe.

Sun Menglan introduced that the full-automatic parking garage covers an area of ​​5 square meters on average. Each parking space covers an area of ​​1:8 with common self-propelled parking spaces under the same conditions. And when the car is turned off and put in storage, people do not need to enter the library to smell the exhaust gas. Generally, the time for accessing a car does not exceed 120 seconds. Accessing a car consumes only 0.4 degrees. In Beijing, the traditional parking mode covers a large area. The residential areas, alleys, green spaces, and roadsides are all parking spaces, squeezing people's living space, and even blocking fire exits. This wastes both land and great potential risks.

The reporter once visited Wolfsburg, where Volkswagen's headquarters is located in Germany. There are two modern circular parking garages, each of which can accommodate 400 cars. With the push of a button, the vehicle is automatically transported from the parking tower to the showroom in a very short period of time. The two parking towers automatically access 1000 vehicles each day. For traditional parking spaces, the 2000 square meters area can only park 100 vehicles. In a metropolitan city that does not use land, it does not use a three-dimensional parking garage. Where do you find thousands of square meters of large-scale land plots?

Li Kemin, chairman of the Beijing Municipal Parking Garage Construction Working Committee, believes that due to the accelerating pace of urban construction, urban land resources are becoming more and more in short supply, and it is unrealistic to use a large amount of land resources to meet the rapid growth of parking spaces. Therefore, it is necessary to build parking facilities. There is a breakthrough in thinking. It should use technological means to develop fully automatic three-dimensional parking, to "three-dimensional" space, three-dimensional parking as the main direction of urban parking reform.

The reporter believes that this direction of development is in line with the spirit of building a conservation-minded society and can effectively alleviate the contradiction between the shortage of land and the rapid increase in motor vehicles.