Streamlined body, alluring enamel finish, the latest functions, four-wheel steering, rotary engine, anti-lock brakes.... how many pairs of eyes glisten with desire!

Own one and you'll own the world: The auto industry spent more money on television advertising last year than any other industry, with commercials featuring hot new cars and sexy women. Despite the shrinking global economy and large-scale layoffs by automakers, sales of imported cars in Taiwan last year climbed by more than 200 percent. More than 4,000 Mercedes have been sold from last year to date, including over 50 Mercedes 600s, with a sticker price of NT$6.3 million. Dealers are slack-jawed in amazement and keep crying "Terrific!"

Whetted by this all-out packaging and sales promotion drive, people's desire for cars grows ever more intense, and cars are no longer simply a tool of transportation. "Own one and you'll own the world"--cars project a certain image and prestige. A stretch limo carries a CEO, a black sedan with tinted windows a government official, a Mercedes 300 perhaps an underworld boss.... Certain people drive certain cars. As their car is, so is their status.

Then there are the people who originally bought a car just to get around in but now have to slave away simply to keep it. A hefty chunk of the family's salary goes to pay for insurance, maintenance, fuel, licenses and traffic tickets--and except for the latter item, they part with it happily.

Some people love their car so much they coddle it like Roy Rodger's Trigger. Come weekends, they can easily spend half the day washing and waxing and polishing their baby, down to the last chrome detail. Left alone inside, the children aren't lonely in the least: They're busy racing their Matchbox cars.

Some people collect cars and savor them like works of art. Others peel off to the countryside for a heady spin, free as the wind....

But hold it just a minute. The culture of the automobile entails some other things: air pollution, fatal accidents, destruction of the scenery. Besides bringing people convenience, freedom and pride of ownership, what sort of price have cars exacted on us in return?

The price in air pollution: Fossil fuel burning vehicles have become the main source of air pollution in many large cities around the world.

In Taipei, for instance, factories have been systematically located outside the city limits, but millions of miniature factories on wheels--cars and motorcycles--are the main producers of air pollution.

Urbanites "fumed out of the city" who climb up any of the surrounding hills and gaze down overlook a brown sooty haze that forms a stark contrast with the blue sky above. "More than 90 percent of the smog in Taipei comes from cars and motorcycles," information from the Environmental Protection Administration clearly states.

There are so many cars in Taipei it's hard to budge--even without them, people feel packed cheek to jowl. Environmentalists describe modern day people as "half-human, half-car," and the part that's turned car "is breathing so heavily it's creating pollution that's attacking the other half."

The pollutants produced by engine combustion are extremely complex, and not just limited to damaging respiration.

Way back when, the sole standard for automotive R&D was "making it go faster." Nowadays, prodded by the demands of environmental protection, automakers are striving to come up with ways of making emissions cleaner. There's an urgent need. Car emissions contain lead, for instance, and according to a study by the department of public health at National Taiwan University, the lead content of mothers' milk is three times higher than it was 20 years ago.

The most frightening effect of lead is its potential harm to infants' intelligence. Fortunately, engines have been developed to run on unleaded fuel and Taiwan will switch to all unleaded gasoline in 1997, but the removal of lead is merely a single step by the car industry in environmental protection.

Eliminate old cars, reduce pollution: Other exhaust gases, such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, not only cause damage to the human body directly but are culprits in acid rain and the greenhouse effect, harming us indirectly as well.

Gasoline engines aren't as powerful as diesel engines, so buses, trucks and other large vehicles generally run on diesel fuel, which is a much heavier pollutant. Diesel emissions are more harmful than gasoline emissions and contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon, a confirmed carcinogen. Yet cleaning gasoline and diesel fuel emissions is very dif ficult problem.

More and more cars and motorcycles use environmental protection as a selling point. But given how they work--burning fuel to produce power-- and the laws of physics, their engines are bound to emit something. Nature is basically cyclical, but in the "manufacturing process" of engine combustion, the cycle becomes linear. Fuel that has been burned, rather than being returned to the cycle, is emitted into the environment as a pollutant.

As a result, governments around the world have been forced to demand that automakers lower their emissions year by year. Environmentalists have established short-term and long-term standards in the hope that makers can improve engine R&D, eliminate old models and bring out new ones that make less polluting. But since the number of cars is constantly increasing, even though the pollution of each individual car is declining, the total amount of pollution may still climb.

Motorcyclists inhaling carcinogens behind buses, children breathing in particulates that cause respiratory and skin ailments, drivers growing drowsy from carbon monoxide... the damage to human health is a huge invisible social cost.

What can be done? If people really want to decrease the pollution from automobile engines, "The best way is to cut back unnecessary trips and stop wasting resources!" bluntly states Su Kuo-tze, a specialist in the EPA's air protection division.

What price do people really pay for traffic congestion? It's going a bit too far to ask people not to use cars at all or not to be active. But today automobiles, at the same time as they are producing pollution, also are unable to produce their "mobile" function.

Drivers all know that, based on the same mileage, driving on a traffic-fee highway is most economical and energy efficient. A car that can get twelve kilometers to the liter in the suburbs gets only seven or eight after entering Taipei, so one-third of the gasoline is expended on traffic congestion.

According to Casper Shih, president of the China Productivity Center, it is estimated that in 1990 more than NT$50 billion in work time and energy resources was lost in Taipei City alone for that year. That's twice the cost of the entire first north-south highway. As for the emotional stress of traffic congestion and the personal expenses associated with traffic jam-related physical and psychological illness, that's just "icing on the cake."

Transportation departments in Taiwan account for thirty percent of all energy use, and of that highway use accounts for 80%. Today most people use private automobiles as their means of transportation, and most goods are shipped by truck--but are these two tools really more efficient?

In fact, the amount of energy a mass transportation system uses to carry one person is only one third that of a sedan. In the book L'Ecologisme published in France, after careful analysis it is concluded that if people really sat down and calculated how much time they spend on a car-- working more hours to buy a car, plus maintenance and insurance, and driving time, and then the time to find a parking space--the result is that the service actually received from an automobile is an average of nine kilometers per hour, slower even than a bicycle.

Of course, given the complexity of today's social organization and employment structure, you can't ask people to solve the problem by riding bikes. Environmental scholars by no means discount the utility of cars. But if everyone who used a car could understand a bit of the loss of efficiency that automobiles bring them, they might try to think of ways to reduce the side-effects cars have for them.

The U.S., widely considered to have the most developed highway system in the world, has already discovered that the amount of energy required to get a given amount of goods or a given number of people from one place to another requires the investment of ever more resources. An American transportation expert points out that no matter what advantages America has gotten from vehicles over the past fifty years, it is easy to discover that the bill is far more than anyone can afford.

When the negative impact of a tool exceeds its positive impact, or when it produces effects precisely the opposite to those initially intended, "then this instrument becomes a counter-productive instrument," argues L'Ecologisme. In this era, cars have already become counterproductive vehicles.

How much do people really pay for automobile accidents? Traffic jams of course do not occur everywhere, and most people do indeed gain many advantages from the speed of vehicles--for example the time required to get someone to emergency medical care is greatly lessened. But vehicles are like water--it can float a boat, or capsize it. And aren't nine out of ten collisions caused by speed?

According to statistics, from the first appearance of motor vehicles in the 1870s to the present, more people have been killed in accidents than in both world wars combined.

Incredible? Look at Taiwan. The numbers say that on average ten people a day are killed in accidents here--or in military terms, that's one squad of nine men per day plus one! And that doesn't even count the twelve per day injured in road mishaps.

Traffic fatalities have helped make accidental death the number two killer of people in Taiwan. The age cohort of those killed is mainly strong young people from 18 to 40, i.e. probably the most productive member of a given household. The damage to families from traffic deaths, the costs to society, and the after-effects of accidents all add up to another inestimable cost along with long lines of traffic and squandering of energy.

But Chang Hsin-li, professor of Transportation Engineering and Management at National Chiaotung University, says that even if you want to study this there's no place to really begin. Domestic traffic incidents must by law be completely handled within three days. Records of traffic deaths are often cursory or arbitrary. Without the help of firm statistical data, researching and mapping out a system to cope with these accidents is impossible.

For example, last year 600 less people were killed in traffic mishaps than the year before. But it seems no one can say how these results came about. Is it because there was a better rescue and emergency network? Did traffic congestion lead to the result of less people driving private cars? If you can't get the central point, then you don't know where to devote attention.

The impact of traffic safety education is not immediately felt. Everyone figures that the risks of an accident occurring to oneself are small, and affected families often become part of minority-disadvantaged groups.

Respect for life under the wheel: In the traffic system in Taiwan today, the part of trafficsafety which is getting the most attention is probably the safety structure of the automobile itself. Cars are constantly increasing in safety: air bags, stronger brake systems.... and wealthier people can "wrap" themselves in an expensive imported luxury sedan. But at the same time, there has been no increase in consideration of the safety of pedestrians, motorcyclists, or even drivers themselves in the mapping out of roads. Most streets in Taipei have never been beautified or planned--green space and safety islands are minuscule--and they lack structure or rhythm, utterly without regard for the feelings and spirit of the driver.

What makes traffic safety experts cringe most is, just as vehicles shrink the physical space between people, they simultaneously pull people farther apart in terms of mutual respect. "I've got a car--out of my way," is the way drivers think today. Thus the percentage of accidents caused by mechanical failures in cars is less than 5%. The vast majority is caused by driver error, speeding, and drunk driving. A study by Chiao Tung University revealed that only 5% of drivers responsible for accidents in which people are killed actually face any legal punishment. In Japan, no matter whose fault a traffic accident is, a person who hits and kills someone automatically has their license revoked for life. In England, drunk driving is treated as manslaughter.

The driving habits of people today are the lessons for the next generation. But what kids see are cars going the wrong way on one-way streets, pedestrians weaving in between the cars, motorcyclists driving without helmets.... The Taiwan Railway Administration discovered in a recent comparison of the highway transportation systems of the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Japan, and Korea that although Taiwan's rate of accidents is no higher than elsewhere, the death rate is the highest by far.

In 1865, when steam engine vehicles first hit the road, people in England immediately set a "steam engine law" to limit driving speed--6 km/hr in the suburbs, 3 km/hr in the city--even slower than walking. In order to ensure the safety of pedestrians, it was even required that a person carries a red flag and serve as a guide out in front. In the first crack of dawn in the motor vehicle age, human life was still given priority.

Only when we have a driving culture that respects human life can mankind really have a true motor-vehicle "civilization."

What price will people pay for roads? Cars have an invisible, indirect effect on people's lives. Most obvious and easy to see is the reaction they have with "space," which is also the most difficult cost to assess.

Firstly, the relationship between cars and roads means that cars come to be the "sole occupiers" of urban space. Sixty-five percent of Taipei's cars are parked on the roads. The city was originally a place that brought people together, but it seems that in both time and space the car has nullified this meaning. Taking the example of Los Angeles as a place where the car culture was built, cars and their parking spaces occupy 75 percent of the total land area. It seems that free urban space is all just main roads and car parks.

In Taipei, wanting straight, fast, efficient roads can only mean the sacrifice of houses and historical sites. With the coalescing of values that lack respect for historical culture, people can even feel that, for the sake of the car, the heritage housing at Linan-tai can be relocated and the historical North Gate be stuck under a flyover, losing the last fragments that might allow our descendants to grope for and imagine some kind of historical space.

Roads that are the monopoly of cars give birth to their own "culture," riding roughshod over the lives and landscape of city dwellers. The Chienkuo North-South Viaduct majestically cut through residential districts; today roads are being developed in great numbers with high-speed roads, orbital roads, flyovers and mass transit system lines. Apart from the sky over Taipei leaving people breathless, how much more coarse hardware there now is!

The recently completed Tamshui Orbital Road follows the course of the Tamshui river. Although the river is dirty and unappreciated, in a few more years it could be revived and then the orbital road will certainly detract from the riverside scenery. Who likes to look at a river scene with a road at the top, along which an endless stream of cars is flowing?

Cars: civilization? If in 30-years time, cars have disappeared, we will regret many of the things we are doing today, our throwing away of so many treasures and invisible values we should not lose!" says scholar of architecture Li Chien-lang.

The English writer Charles Dickens begins his novel Bleak House with the passage, "Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it roles defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city ... Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards....".

This was London a century ago, the most industrialized capital city in the world at that time. The "fog" was actually atmospheric pollution caused by the burning of coal. "The antagonistic dichotomy of things dominated by technology is very clear," is how one student of the environment explains industrial civilization. At the same time as they bring great material pleasure to humanity, they also deepen our suffering.

But under the pen of the novelist, the only legacy of industrial civilization is that of fog and filthy air. The atmosphere of today is but an extension of that of tomorrow; yet the quality of life in the present cannot guarantee its quality in the future. So, in the eyes of our descendants, which part of the "car civilization" will they be left with?

[Picture Caption]

Some love them, some admire them and some collect them--what price will people pay for cars? (photo by Vincent Chang)

Wheels or no wheels, it is hard to inch forward as today's car-people are submerged under a fog of deadly fumes. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

Pretty flower, do you mourn the victims or lament the car culture's disrespect for life?

Taipei's North Gate has been rudely stuck under a flyover to make way for the highway.

The Mucha branch of the mass rapid transit system has landed on top of the Police Academy gate.

Today's motorcyclists are models for the next generation; what kind of driving culture will they learn from us?

Wheels or no wheels, it is hard to inch forward as today's car-people are submerged under a fog of deadly fumes. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）

Pretty flower, do you mourn the victims or lament the car culture's disrespect for life?

Taipei's North Gate has been rudely stuck under a flyover to make way for the highway.

The Mucha branch of the mass rapid transit system has landed on top of the Police Academy gate.

Today's motorcyclists are models for the next generation; what kind of driving culture will they learn from us?