If China wants to dominate the world, it should not make itself into a second-rate USA:
In the next two years, the city will need a great number of parking spaces for at least 2.5 million cars, according to a joint analysis in Beijing.
By the end of May 2013, more than 5.31 million vehicles were owned and operated in the streets and that number grew at a rate of nearly 20,000 vehicles per month.
Along with the heavy traffic congestion, the lack of parking lots have been a development woe for the city. By 2010, there were about 2.17 million parking spaces, including 1.39 million in parking lots and 0.78 million in residential areas.
China should do everything it can to become something that’s as far from the US as possible. Building more parking lots (a distinctly American solution) will not solve a single problem, but only entangle more and more people in a form of transportation that can only work if it’s heavily subsidized. These parking lots will not only be a waste of space but, if the US is an example, will also need to be cheap to attract users. And if they are cheap, it will mean they will not be able to pay for themselves in a conventional way but by distributing their costs into other areas of economic activity (the prices of goods, taxes, and so on). This means those who do not use cars will also end up paying for these ugly and for the most part useless spaces.
The only way mass car ownership can work is if the society is politically committed to the cost of its maintenance—a cost which is far too high to be supported by the market alone. Remove the politics, and the whole thing falls apart—the jams, the pollution, the accidental deaths, the waste, the destruction of urban spaces will overwhelm its small bits of usefulness. The fact China is turning to the car system reveals the emergence of a political order that’s absolutely needed to sustain it.
What sustains the car is not infrastructure but politics.
