City air chokes us till we wave the confusion away
Clean air needs less traffic, more leg power, and economic justice
| While burning all the petrol we do is one way we alter global climate, doing it in crowded localities is so bad that some people in some cities must pay to import bottled air. Bad as it gets, it can get better. Technology is not the obstacle. It's our blindspot where the call for economic justice should be. |
by Jeffery J. Smith
June, 2007
Take a deep breath. Or, maybe not. Not if you’re in the Indian city of Calcutta. Traffic has so dirtied the air that 70% of its residents suffer from lung disease, including breathing difficulties, asthma, and lung cancer.
The worst offenders are the 50,000 rickshaws – half of them unregistered – that burn "kantatel". This fuel is a deadly concoction of kerosene and petrol. Government cannot force rickshaw drivers to convert to a cleaner fuel because they’re protected by powerful trade unions.
What government has done is soothe the headaches of police who breathe the worst smog at work. The city equipped traffic offices with oxygen concentrators, the kind used by patients in hospitals. Doctors caution, however, that the oxygen cannot dislodge pollutants buried deep in the lungs. (17 May 2007, BBC News)
While Calcutta is especially bad, no pollution is good. In recent years it’s been reported that:
- Motorcycle cops and tollbooth workers inhale so much carbon monoxide, that might explain why some of them are so surly.
- School nurses treat students occasionally for scrapes and tummy aches but are swamped by children with asthma, now an epidemic.
- It’s not just our bodies that get degraded but also our crops, buildings, and statues.
Also, drivers don’t pay up front. They don’t toss a quarter into a till every quarter mile to cover the cost of smog, another two bits when streets are congested, plus as much as the market will bear for parking. For cars to pay their way, government must raise taxes on fuels, titles, parking spaces, and on driving during “rush hour” (the original oxymoron?); it’d bring the cost of driving from background, where it gets overlooked, to foreground.
While public transit might be a good idea, it’s like church; people attend in an effort to be good. But more of us would be good – ride transit or pedal bikes or walk – if transit didn’t make us wait so long. Systems could afford to provide more routes and times for riders if they’d just recover the values they create. For example, Washington, DC’s Metro boosted the price people pay for real estate in the region by $10-$15 billion. If recovered, that’s enough to offer rides for free!
Not just a transit system in particular, but let society in general recover the value it imparts to locations. And sweeten the deal by removing taxes on buildings, sales, and wages. When owners pay the rent for their location – but no tax – they’re spurred to refurbish abandoned buildings and put new ones on parking lots. That fills in a city, which provides more riders for mass transit. The greater demand justifies investing in shorter waiting times.
As riding becomes convenient while remaining a bargain, and driving grows inconvenient while rising in cost, more people would switch. People on the go would find alternatives. Others with ideas would provide them, such as jitneys and car libraries. Customers might shop via the Internet. Stores could deliver goods during times of least traffic.
Inner city living could become car-free and carefree. Ever see the photo, “Rush Hour in Venice?” It’s an old guy strolling home carrying a baguette, passed by a gondola. Without traffic there’d be a street scene of pedestrians, sidewalk cafes, and street performers.
The current infestation of cars makes cities crowded like those spaces in the air where clouds of gnats hover and dive-bomb one another and fumey like a prehistoric bubbling tar pit drawing denizens to their doom. But we geonomists can change all that. As cities get around to making people pay for what they take, not what they make, then even the smoggiest would soon become breathable.
---------------------
Jeffery J. Smith runs the Forum on Geonomics.
|
Also see: Cash-For-Oxygen Catching on in Polluted Calcutta
The Green Tax Shift Makes Further Gains
The Folly of Our Superhighway System |
| Email this article | Sign up for free Progress Report updates via email |
What are your views? Share your opinions with The Progress Report:
| Page One | Page Two | Archive |
| Discussion Room | Letters | What's Geoism? |
