Congestion battle part of reshaping society
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There is likely no city in China where traffic has become such a daily annoyance for every denizen as Beijing.
While urbanites now enjoy the luxury and convenience of private cars, the sheer number of additional cars, over 2 million in five years, is threatening to paralyze the capital city.
Hence, Beijing's first comprehensive guidelines for combating congestion have drawn the attention of many people, either hopeful about faster commutes or anxious about limits being placed on car purchases.
Other cities across China are also watching Beijing's actions to try and draw what lessons they can to fix their own growing congestion problems.
What many Chinese cities have in common is their early-year expansion drive that revolved around nothing other than growth. As such, more people have flooded into cities, more offices and shopping malls have sprung up and more vehicles have hit the roads.
However Westernized Chinese cities may now appear, the snail crawl of traffic and the ever-more frequent breakdown of transport systems nationwide have brought these lofty goals hurtling back to earth.
Simply replacing bicycles with cars in a city does not make it modern. The people within must have their basic travel and transport needs met appropriately. Beijing can on occasion feel more like a rich village, with no traffic rules, than a real modern city.
Beijing is determined to deal with traffic problems through all means, including improving the public transport system, limiting the number of new cars allowed to hit the roads, promoting wider usage of school and company buses, as well as spreading out new urban centers to reduce rush-hour bottlenecks.
Beijing's move is a microcosm of China's wider modernization reform. While keeping growth at a reasonable rate, the government's focus will shift to people's quality of life.
Naturally, every citizen has the right to own a car, just as they have the right to own a house to live in. But to guarantee other people also have the right to move freely, everyone has to compromise to keep the entire city going.
The problem does not only lie in a city's transport system. Similar troubles exist in areas such as education, tourism and healthcare, to name but a few.
Although we should now be enjoying the accomplishments of our development, in reality we are suffering from this growth's lack of cohesion.
Beijing will not fix its growing traffic pains in one day. But if we all pause to rethink and reorient our pursuit of a better life, Chinese society may start stepping through to a new threshold.
