A billion cars: the road ahead.

• Author: Tunali, Odil

People in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe want cars just as much as Americans do. The skyrocketing demand is raising hopes, hackles, and questions about sustainability.

At the mid-point of the 20th century, when there were 2.6 billion people on Earth, there were 50 million cars. Now, as we near the end of the century, the human population has more than doubled, but the car population has increased ten-fold - to 500 million. Today, everyone seems to want a car. And within another 25 years there may be 1 billion cars on the world's roads.

It is not in already car-dominated Los Angeles, Paris, or Rome where this is happening, but in the booming cities of the developing world. In China, for example, there are just 1.8 million passenger cars today - one for every 670 people. In ten years, there may be twice as many, and by 2010, that number is projected to rise to 20 million. Such a scenario seems likely to be repeated in most parts of the developing world.

The potential effects of this automotive explosion - on the quality of human life and the sustainability of all life - are staggering. But perceptions of what those effects will mean vary widely, depending on who is doing the perceiving. The world's automotive industries view the projected growth in car demand as a stupendous business opportunity, and a great economic windfall for those countries whose factories can meet the growing demand.

This view is shared by the governments of fast-developing countries like China, India, and Brazil, whose own auto industries are beginning to flourish. Since the American automotive boom of the 1950s and '60s, which coincided with a rapid rise in U.S. economic output and affluence, the standard prescription for development has held that any country aspiring to rapid economic growth must rely on the auto industry as a central industrial "pillar."

Increasingly affluent consumers in developing countries, who represent the potential auto market of the near future, also share this excitement. The vast majority of that market will be in Asia and Latin America, and in formerly Communist countries of Eastern Europe, which are now bent on catching up with their affluent neighbors to the west. To these consumers, cars are not just transportation; they symbolize the highest rewards of the consumer culture: a proof of wealth, power, and personal freedom.

Yet consumers, industrialists, and economic planners are all neglecting the prodigious strains that automotive expansion is placing on both human and environmental health. Motor vehicle transport accounts for half of the world's total oil consumption, generates nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, and has pervasive impacts on land use and air quality. Tailpipe exhaust is now the single largest source of air pollution - surpassing wood fires, coal-burning power plants, and chemical manufacturing - in nearly half the cities of the world. And cities everywhere are choking on the sheer numbers of motor vehicles and the roads that attempt to accommodate them. The result is a declining quality of life in car-dominated cities worldwide.

How these different views are reconciled will go a long way toward determining not just how people will move about during the next century, but what kind of world it will be.

AUTO-MANIA SPREADS TO THE DEVELOPING WORLD

In 1995, world new car sales, at 35 million, arc estimated to have set a record for the second consecutive year. They are projected to rise another 4 percent, to more than 36 million, in 1996. But most of these cars still go to a relatively small number of affluent markets. Countries that make up 16 percent of the world's population - in North America, Europe, Japan, and Oceania - own 81 percent (and produce 88 percent) of all automobiles. The United States alone accounts for 35 percent of car ownership and 25 percent of production.

But as markets in North America and Western Europe become saturated, auto manufacturers are eyeing developing countries, where the rate of car ownership is much lower: China has only 1 percent as many cars as the United States, and India only 2 percent. Since these two countries together have eight times the population of the United States, they constitute a largely untapped market that can be perceived as surpassing anything in the history of commerce. And with China's economy growing at rates unprecedented even in the industrial world, the demand for cars there is beginning to soar.

With the fail of the Iron Curtain and the spread of commercial advertising and trade to even the remotest places, developing countries and the former Eastern Bloc have been uncritically following the development model of the rich countries - striving to emulate both their economies and their lifestyles. The automobile, once an icon of material success mainly for Americans and Europeans, has acquired that meaning everywhere - so much so that even in China, where most adults depend on bicycles for their transportation needs, cycling is now seen as projecting an image of underdevelopment.

In 1993, bicycles were banned from Nanjing Donglu, Shanghai's main street and site of its prestigious shopping area, just so they would be out of sight of tourists and wealthy Chinese shoppers. Cars, on the other hand, are still allowed to use this street despite the paralyzing traffic congestion. Similarly, in Jakarta, Indonesia, thousands of cycle rickshaws were confiscated - allegedly to "reduce congestion," but in reality because they were projecting the wrong image. In these and many other countries, the makers of official policy now aspire to the same kind of large-scale car ownership they see in the West.

So far, nothing has happened to persuade them that this may not be possible - or even desirable. In some parts of Asia where economics are growing fast, car sales are growing faster. Since 1990, South Korea's GDP has increased almost 50 percent, but its car sales have jumped 100 percent, to 2 million a year. China's new car sales are expected to jump by nearly 30 percent in the next year, to 750,000, and to pass 1 million by the end of the decade. In Thailand, the Land Transport Department reports that the growth of new car sales over the last decade is expected to have reached 400 percent. In Malaysia, too, sales of new vehicles increased by 25 percent in the last year alone. With Malaysia's economy forecast to grow at more than 8 percent for an eighth consecutive year, there is unlikely to be any slowdown in the sales figures, according to the Malaysian Motor Traders' Association.

Latin American and the former Eastern Bloc countries are demanding cars at similarly high rates. Auto sales in Brazil have doubled in the last five years, hitting 1.4 million in 1995, In Mexico, before the currency collapse of December 1994, domestic car sales were headed for a 1995 total of at least 600,000 and an annual total of 1.2 million by the end of the decade. In the Czech Republic, new vehicle registrations have increased by 500,000 since 1990, and there are now 2 million cars in this country of 10 million people. Even in Russia, where the economy is widely presumed to be in ruins, car...