Chinese transport: achievements and challenges of transport policies

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, the Chinese economy has experienced unprecedented growth. China is now the second largest world economy, after the US. The growth in the Chinese transport sector has even outpaced that of the economy as a whole: the total number of Chinese motor vehicles has increased from 1.8 million in 1980 to 126.7 million in 2013, and vehicle ownership has grown from 1.8 per 1000 people in 1980 to 93 in 2013 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2014). China has become the world’s largest car market, with annual sales in 2014 at over 18 million passenger vehicles (Chinese Association of Automobile Manufacturers 2015). Together with the fast expansion of air transport and high-speed rail, motor vehicle growth has helped boost personal mobility in China, creating great accessibility to economic and social benefits for people from the entire population spectrum. Also, the auto sector has become a key pillar of the Chinese economy. But these economic and social benefits have come with severe energy, environmental, and social costs. From a net oil-exporting country in the 1980s, China has become a large oilimporting country, with more than 60 % of its oil now imported (Wang and Jin 2014). This trend can have grave geopolitical consequences. Air pollution in China is now a top concern across the population, and the health consequences of air pollution currently include over a million premature deaths per year (Yang et al. 2013). For many Chinese, a blue sky has become a distant memory. Motor vehicles are a major contributor to urban air pollution problems such as ozone and particulate matter (eg, PM2.5) in China (Yao et al. 2012). And of course, the single-minded urban development of the past 30 years, with urban sprawl and land-use patterns that encourage auto use, has caused road congestion and traffic jams that are becoming a real plague (The Economist 2015). Indeed, the very success of China’s automobile market growth has created a set of deep and serious problems. For example, the biggest complaints of Beijing residents are routinely air