The government of China recently released a paper called Sustainable Development of Transportation in China. It doesn’t have a lot of new information — the data it uses are only current through the end of 2019 — but it does make one assertion I’d like to examine in more detail.
An expressway and rail line leaving Shanghai, China. Photo by Pyzhou.
According to chart 3, on page 12 of the Word version, the share of passenger travel that goes by highway declined from 93.5 percent in 2012 to 73.9 percent in 2019. The difference was taken up by railway transport. This makes China’s high-speed rail program, which grew from 6,000 miles in 2012 to 22,000 miles in 2019, look like a great success.
However, there’s something funny about China’s highway travel numbers. As shown in this chart, highway passenger-kilometers grew rapidly from 2008 to 2012. Then in 2013 it nosedived, losing almost 40 percent. It continued to decline over the next six years until by 2019 it was less than half of 2012.
These numbers aren’t realistic. According to the International Organization of Motor Vehicle Manufacturers, the number of passenger cars in China more than quadrupled between 2005 and 2012 (when highway passenger travel was supposed to be growing). Then, instead of dropping in 2013 the way highway travel supposedly did, it grew another 16 percent. The manufacturers association doesn’t have data beyond 2015, but official government data indicates that in 2019 China had 250 million passenger cars, almost triple the number in 2012.
With passenger car numbers growing so rapidly, why would highway travel decline so much? The answer is that it wouldn’t, so it looks like someone decided there was something wrong with the 2012 passenger-kilometer number and made a correction in later years without retroactively correcting the numbers in 2012 and before.
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Which number is more realistic: 1.85 trillion passenger-kilometers in 2012 or 0.86 trillion in 2019? I’ll start by assuming that China’s vehicle occupancies average 1.5 people per car. U.S. vehicle occupancies are higher, but vehicle occupancies are influenced by family sizes, and China’s family sizes are smaller.
Dividing the 2012 number by the number of vehicles in 2012 and by vehicle occupancies suggests that each car was driven about 8,800 miles a year. Americans drive their cars almost 12,000 miles a year, but considering China has higher fuel taxes and road tolls, 8,800 looks about right. Doing the same calculation for the 2019 data indicates that the average car was driven just 1,500 miles a year. That’s unrealistically low — no country in the world drives cars just 1,500 miles a year.
So the 2012 number is actually closer to the truth and that the later numbers were, for some reason, erroneously cut down. Maybe someone was trying to make the high-speed rail program look better than it is. Rail ridership numbers have been growing at about 6 percent per year while passenger vehicle numbers have been growing at 16 percent per year. That makes it appear that further spending on high-speed trains (almost all of which lose money) would be wasted.
China would want to make the hundreds of billions it has spent on high-speed trains look good on the international stage. As everyone “knows,” automobiles are not “sustainable” while trains are, even though the trains will perpetually lose money while the automobiles (whose drivers pay fuel taxes that go into the country’s general funds plus road tolls that pay for the roads) are a money-maker for the government. In any case, it is simply not believable that a country that saw automobile numbers triple would also see total driving cut in half.
Update: Mystery solved (apparently): Wendell Cox informs me that China only reports highway passenger miles carried by buses, not automobiles. The reported numbers indicate buses carried the average resident of China 1,370 passenger miles in 2012, falling to 470 miles in 2019. The decline would be due to increased auto ownership more than high-speed rail.
Cox also estimates that the Chinese drive their personal vehicles even more miles per year than Americans. As of 2013, automobiles carried 60 percent of the country’s passenger travel while rail carried 16 percent, bus 15 percent, and air 10 percent. Automobile numbers, and presumably auto travel, have nearly doubled since then.
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These numbers aren’t realistic.
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Doesn’t seem like it but the may not be so far off. There’s all sort so quirky things going on. People who have the money will be multiple cars. They do this in places where driving is restricted to certain days based on your license plate.
And that’s one of the questions, how do those driving restrictions affect over all driving?
Or are the bureaucrats massaging their numbers to better reflect Beijing’s desires? After all, no in the West believes China’s GDP #s for the same reason, they’re endlessly massage and changed to better reflect Beijing’s goals, not what is actually going on.
Until the late 1990s, China was a nation of cyclists, Cycles were for everything, including personal transport, cargo, transit cabs. Bicycles were such a vital part of everyday life that in the 1970s, owning one was a prerequisite for marriage. An army” rolled through the streets of Beijing every morning like a flowing Great Wall. Then, from 1995 to 2002, the government created bicycle-reduction policies in order to encourage the growth of the auto industry and usage of the mass transit infrastructure. To subsidize those industries they dumped biking.
China had sustainable transport 30 years ago.
Before mass adoption of the automobile, China had 600 million bikes running down urban and rural China.
Bikes are made of Aluminium mostly, whose production is very energy intensive. About 17,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity (61.2 Gigajoules) are required to produce 1 metric ton of aluminium, 5% that to remelt aluminum scrap to make a fresh tonne. Steel requires 13 Gigajoules to make a ton of steel, but unlike a car which is made of 33 pounds of aluminum, a car needs 1500-2200 pounds of steel, Aluminum requires More energy but steel requires Coke (COAL), aluminum can be manufactured by clean electricity sources like hydro (In fact it often is; where there’s dams there are aluminum plants)
The point is China took advantage of a device; they gave permanent mobility on a mass basis even with a primitive road system. Low-tech masterpieces
The importance of the Chinese wheelbarrow can only be understood in the context of the Chinese transportation network. Prior to the third century AD, China had an extensive and well-maintained road network suited for animal powered carts and wagons. It was only surpassed in length by the Ancient Roman road network. The Chinese road infrastructure attained a total length of about 25,000 miles (40,000 km), compared to almost 50,000 miles (80,000 km) for the Roman system. The Chinese and Roman road systems were built (independently) over the course of five centuries during the same period in history. Curiously, due to (unrelated) political reasons, both systems also started to disintegrate side by side from the third century AD onwards, and herein lies the explanation for the success of the Chinese wheelbarrow. As we have seen, the one-wheeled vehicle appeared during this period, and this is no coincidence. Increasingly, it was the only vehicle that could be operated on the deteriorating road network. As F.H. King observed: “For adaptability to the worst road conditions no vehicle equals the wheelbarrow, progressing by one wheel and two feet”. Interestingly, the modern, twentieth-century road network that appeared in China, and that Hommel was alluding to in 1937, did not immediately gave way to the automobile, but to another low-tech vehicle that is a worthy competitor for the wheelbarrow: the bicycle, a product of the Industrial Revolution that is even more efficient. It will probably take us (and the 21st-century Chinese) another few decades before we realise how smart the Chinese transport infrastructure was.
China is pushing cars, that requires huge volumes of registries and data , tracking people
At least in the United States most bicycles are made out of some sort of steel. Aluminum is generally a more upmarket material and I doubt that many bicycles in China were made of it.
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It will probably take us (and the 21st-century Chinese) another few decades before we realise how smart the Chinese transport infrastructure was.
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~LazyReader
There wasn’t anything smart about it. It wasn’t a choice. It was due to a lack of choice.
In 1990 the average _urban_ family’s annual disposable income was, if they were lucky, a thousand or $2K a year. You can’t afford anything but a bike with that sort of money. There was nothing clever about Mao & company grinding China into being poorer than Sub-Saharan Africa.