Do the streets of Taipei resemble a battlefield? At the intersections, the cars advance together shrouded in smoke. The only law that gets any respect is "charge ahead if it's green, full speed if it's yellow." (Red is just for reference.) The larger vehicles bully the smaller ones, who in turn bully the pedestrians, who run for their lives, scattering in all directions.

Do the streets of Taipei resemble a parking lot? The traffic advances at one kilometer an hour. Taxi drivers have cramps from hitting the breaks so much. Bus drivers are pained by full bladders. Those heading off to work leave in the dark to avoid the traffic and snare a parking spot. Then they'll eat breakfast, read the paper, nap and start work full of energy. Take some time out to listen to a traffic report, why don't you? Rejoice in others' misfortune for a moment.

In their beloved cars, they sit in traffic: "Jammed! Jammed! Jammed! The whole road is jammed!" the traffic reporter's voice pierces the airwaves. "From Hsintien to Taipei? Jammed!" "The Chiang Kai-shek Bridge? Jammed!" "The Chienkuo North-South Viaduct? Jammed!" "Hsin-sheng Viaduct? Still jammed!" "Everybody listen to some music and have patience. There's a long stretch of smooth going up ahead!" Then a joke: "The car industry is going to promote the following kind of car for Taipei: one with a frame made entirely of hardened steel, that can handle smashing and being smashed. Super-hard paint. Shatter-proof super-hard glass that won't scratch or break. Buy one and get a free samurai-type stick lock. The four-wheel steering is convenient for parking.... If you want to buy, you better hurry...."

According to statistics of Taipei's Department of Transportation, by July of this year, Taipei City already had 570,000 cars--five times the figure a decade ago. If you throw in motorcycles, there are 1.4 million vehicles clogging the city's streets and alleys.

Everyone drives, everyone sits in traffic, and everyone suffers. We breathe dirty air and risk accidents. Sitting in our cars as the seconds and minutes tick by, our mood grows steadily sour. Stomach aches, head aches and all sorts of minor ailments ensue.

Of course this problem isn't unique to Taipei. From Los Angeles and Mexico City, to London and Rome, to Tokyo and Bangkok, residents are frying inside of cars because of the abundance of them. The traffic jam has become "a disease of civilization" found in cities everywhere. In Bangkok recently, a heavy downpour extended the peak time for traffic, and the roads didn't gradually empty out until the middle of the night. The next day, when many of the city's residents were too scared to go to work or school, the newspapers joked that people should bring a chamber pot with them before riding a car or bus.

Collective abuse? Driving automobiles has become collective abusive behavior, and suppressing the growth of cars and motorcycles has recently become the newest transportation strategy.

"Only by limiting the number of cars that can enter the city center can you improve the urban environment," says Lan Wu-wang, an associate professor at the Transportation Research Institute of National Chiao Tung University, giving voice to what people in every country have realized about transportation problems. To bring back some efficiency to how things move around in the cities, all sorts of direct and indirect management methods have been proposed to limit cars in urban areas--even to the point of banishing cars altogether from the densely populated inner cities.

"Let us once again raise the city gates!" This is the battle cry of the city of Vienna, Austria, where gates to control traffic flow have been placed in the major roads leading into the city. Once the vehicles in the city reach a certain number, the gates are closed.

But from the perspective of social cost and fairness, private vehicles ought first to be expelled from the crowded urban jungle, leaving public buses, trucks and public service vehicles to use the roads with greater efficiency.

In America, where the ownership of private cars is most prevalent, President Bush made the following statement when announcing transportation measure three years ago: "Because America has too strongly emphasized convenience to individuals, roads have been spreading unchecked, and the unpleasant side effects of the rapid growth in private vehicles have already offset their benefits."

Of those employed in Taipei, 45 percent go to work in private vehicles, the bulk of which carry only one or two passengers at a time. They come into to the city and park for work in the morning and then leave after work lets out. They are used inefficiently, and parking problems are the result.

Great expectations, no Willingness to accommodate: For many years, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and the Taipei Department of Transportation designed and promoted a car-pooling scheme and encouraged greater flexibility in working hours in order to lower Taipei's high tide of cars. But the city's residents have continued to have great expectations about improving the traffic situation but little willingness to change their behavior accordingly. The incentive of dropping bridge tolls for cars with three or more persons was not enough to overcome the desire for privacy. With people unwilling to ride with strangers, the Institute of Transportation of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications tried to serve as matchmaker, using computers to bring people together for car pools. Its efforts were in vain.

The Institute of Transportation has also come up with a "make-the-drivers-pay" strategy of a registration fee, a license tax, higher tolls and parking fees for cars, and a requirement that drivers obtain a private parking space. In the past, when the government let out information about such measures, they would be greatly watered down when the public reacted unfavorably. Even when they have been adopted, such as incessant hikes in the license tax in recent years, they haven't deterred car owners.

The Department of Transportation of Taipei City has suggested raising the parking meter rates by 50 percent in the hope that greater sensitivity about price will suppress the droves driving into the city."

Singapore is the city whose efforts to gradually weed out private automobiles are best known. Its price control measures have been particularly notable: Since 1975 Singapore has used a system of "area passes" and a "traffic tax" to reduce the number of cars on the road during peak hours. And if you want to buy a new car, you've got to bid for a set number of purchase permits. From the registration fee onwards, the fees will run to some three and half times what the car itself costs.

People are racking their brains to calculate such social costs of driving as parking, traffic and accidents, so that the bill can be left on the windshields of the culprits, the drivers. A few examples: In New York's Chinatown, parking fees can run as high as US$100 for the time it takes to eat a meal; in Japan you need to have an off-street parking space if you're going to buy a car.

But if you want a car-free Taipei? "First you've got to break the habit of building major construction projects to try resolving transportation problems," says Lin Chien-yuan, an associate professor at National Taiwan University's Graduate Institute of Building and Planning. People always think that the only way to deal with the incessant growth in the number of automobiles is magically building more roads and parking lots. But even if Taipei could create 100,000 or 200,000 new parking spaces, would the illegal parkers really disappear?

Demand for parking--a bottomless pit: The experts don't think so. "Demand for parking spaces is a bottomless pit; this kind of collective demand can never be satisfied," says Hu Pao-lin, an expert in city planning who compares this demand to a child eating candy: His hunger for it only grows larger the more he eats. Chang Chia-ju, the director of the Institute of Transportation, and many other traffic management scholars hold that the best tack to take is to reclaim parking spaces in the basements of many high rises now being used illegally for other purposes.

These days one frequently hears that "the growth of roads in Taipei will never keep pace with the growing number of cars." Cities have fixed ratios of roads per square mile, and over 90 percent of the roads planned for Taipei have already been built. If roads were to keep pace with the 20 percent annual growth in cars, "in a few years there wouldn't be anything left of the city" because the office buildings, public facilities and the residential areas--even the Mucha Zoo that children so love -- would all be "developed" as roads.

Building roads and parking spaces is like shooting addictive drugs. The more roads, the more convenient driving becomes. This convenience leads to a growth in private vehicles. Then you have to build more roads again. "If you want cars to be used with great efficiency," Chang stresses, "building broad roads is no way to go about doing it." And it's the same for the roads between cities--because even if you build 20 north-south freeways, the cars won't be able to get off the highway and enter the cities when they get there.

Let them sit in traffic until they snap: "No parking lots!" "No broadened roads!" "Shrink the roads!" These are campaign slogans used in Vienna over the last two years.

A foreign study has even reported that once traffic slows to about 8 miles (13 kilometers) an hour, "the cars disappear" as people switch to public transportation to enter the city. In London and Milan, if someone still wants to drive into the city, bystanders either wonder if they're crazy or scold them for being "selfish." Thus, traffic, if "left to its own devices," will hit an extreme and find a natural balance. This is an invisible method of eliminating cars.

But Taipei often gets jammed down to a speed of only 10 kilometers an hour, slower than the speed of a bicycle, while the number of people buying cars has continued growing unabated. The fortitude with which Taipei's drivers withstand traffic exceeds what foreign experts had imagined possible. Here it's unlikely that anyone would dare adopt a transportation policy of "letting them sit snarled in traffic until they snap."

What is our transportation policy? As we face the traffic in what is quickly becoming "the greater Taipei parking lot," what method should we adopt?

"It's simple," says Chang Chia-ju. "We should suppress the growth of private automobiles and develop public transportation. Particularly because Taiwan has a limited amount of usable land and will hence approach its breaking point faster than other countries, measures restricting cars should be more severe than those adopted in Europe and America."

It's unfortunate that past transportation policies, like social welfare and environmental policies, took a back seat to economic development. In the long term, excessive growth of private vehicles is all but inevitable when a convenient mass transit system is lacking.

The quarrels as to whether the mass transit system should be above or below ground began in the sixties and carried on until 1987 when work finally began and everybody already had cars and motorcycles anyway. There are virtually no experts who bear any hope that the early network will absorb many of the working crowd when it is finished in 1998. In particular at the beginning, since the early network is only a system of poorly connected single lines, many people hold that the system is "going to lose a lot of money."

Mass transit can solve the problem: But the lack of immediate results does not mean that it shouldn't be built. Lin Chien-yuan holds that the city is like an organism; one can look at the mass transit system as coping with future growth. Anyway, you've got to start from somewhere. Once these lines are completed, the system can slowly be expanded into a full-fledged network while its riders grow. At least with a convenient and inexpensive mass transit system, you'll know you're doing the right thing in controlling private vehicles.

The privacy of cars and their ability to go door to door can in no way be duplicated by mass transit. If you've got to be stuck in traffic, wouldn't you choose to be able to flick on the air conditioning and the tape deck? To put it another way, even if Taipei's mass transit system covers the city in a spider-web fashion a la Tokyo, it won't make cars disappear overnight.

After Singapore completed its mass transit system, it raised its traffic tax for incoming cars. London had a subway system in the 19th century when horse-driven carriages were still clomping along the streets, but it too has traffic jams. Hence, providing a mass transit system to people before they become drivers will at best delay the day when they buy cars. Steady growth in car ownership accompanied by mass transit systems that lose money has already become a problem with no solution for many countries.

Don't ask if collecting fees from the drivers of private vehicles to supplement public funds for mass transit is going to work miracles, scholars hold. "At least it's fair."

Giving buses special privileges: "Another aspect is giving public transportation more room to grow," says Lin Hsin-cheng, the head of Taipei's Department of Transportation. For example, some people criticize the city's ten special bus lanes for being "special privileges." But giving buses special privileges is fair. Only if public transit has room to grow will it be able to compete with private cars.

It's just unfortunate that public transportation--or namely the buses--are in themselves one source of the traffic mess. Taking "the longest time for the shortest distance," they often get stuck in the intersections along their winding routes, bringing misfortune on vehicles of all sizes behind them.

Yu Tsao-ching, an associate professor of architecture at Chung Yuan Christian University, points out that buses ought to have simple straight routes and rely on riders to make transfers. But fearing that business will drop by half if riders have to switch buses, the bus companies sacrifice speed. Everyone wants to get from one given point to another. For example, people from Neihu, Hsichih, Peitou, Panchiao or from wherever all want to be able to go directly to the Taipei train station. As a result, more than 70 different bus routes all have stops on Chunghsiao West Road. And there's no Simple bus map you can give to foreign visitors.

Whatever you're riding, you'll get stuck: Currently there are nine private companies that share Taipei's bus routes, and all of them want the hottest lines. Unwilling to set aside their squabbles and cooperate in forming an overall system that includes free transfers, "It's only natural that no one is interested in the buses and they continue to lose money," says Chen Tuan-chi, associate professor of Transportation Management at Tamkang University. People have got to cultivate a willingness to transfer if any means of public transportation--buses or otherwise--is going to be used effectively.

In the view of transportation experts, every method of transportation has its unique strengths. In their view, an ideal city transportation network will, as much as possible, get cars to park on the periphery of the city, where mass transit will shuttle them into town. In today's Tokyo, you can begin to see clearly how each of the various forms of transportation has its own special place. Private cars are largely parked on the outskirts of the city and are used for emergencies, long rides, leisure and for linking up with public transit when entering the city.

What about after getting into town. Besides using buses for transportation within small districts and for linking up with other forms of mass transit, in a city with six million journeys a day, even if people go back to driving bicycles--or even riding horses and donkeys--there will still be traffic jams. If you want get to the root of things by waiting for a complete solution of balanced urban development when a self-contained city district or town is built from scratch, it would be best not to forget that everyone has two legs that take up less space than any other means of transportation.

Still got two legs: The residents of Taipei, who seem often to be strong spirited but weak bodied about transit problems, should show the courage to get out of their cars and walk.

Here's a joke: A child angrily says, "If I could drive, I'd definitely run away from home!" Modern people often forget that we each have a pair of legs. "Walk an hour to get to work? It's too much work!" "Ride a bicycle for half an hour? It's too tiring."

And there still more excuses people can give.

"Cars and economic development are closely related," a businessman might say. "In particular, now that we've designated Taipei as an international commercial center, if we want to mold a strongly competitive environment--in order to grab business opportunities and clients--or if you want to be able to have quick responses and high productivity, unless you don't mind being less prosperous, how can you not want a car?"

"The car industry can't go on without money coming in," an economic official might say. "Hundreds of thousands of people in the car industry and related fields can't all lose their jobs."

Or, "We're not an authoritarian country," a transportation official might think. "We can't just go about prohibiting people from buying cars. If someone has money, how can you stop him from buying a car?"

"With economic development, people's desires grow. And how many people are concerned about the negative costs that cars bring anyway? Even if you could add up all the social costs cars inflict, so what?" When transportation experts are of this mind, even restrictions on private cars and excellent public transit won't remove the cars from Taipei.

[Picture Caption]

Taipei? Taipei! The city during an air raid drill. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

The train's in the station? No, it's the line of buses in front of the train station. "Lady, there's no hurry. Who knows how long it will be before we move!"

From dawn to dusk, cars, why are you always jammed? Can you understand how helpless I feel?

Keep moving ahead, stop for nothing; Taipei's pedestrians know that with nothing ventured, there's nothing gained.

Give the earth's surface to the cars, and let the pedestrians scurry around them. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

You're a courageous marine in the busy sea of cars; I'm a sorry soul in a can of sardines.

A chance encounter in the twilight....

You have a road still to travel; I want to make my way home. We were fated to meet in a no-parking zone and have it out.

On the earth's surface, the roads have already been developed to saturation, and they have nowhere to go but up. If you drop your guard for a moment, you'll lose your way.

Taipei at night, Taipei at night--the lights are like running waterand the cars like dragons. (photo by Pu Hua-chih)

The train's in the station? No, it's the line of buses in front of the train station. "Lady, there's no hurry. Who knows how long it will be before we move!".

From dawn to dusk, cars, why are you always jammed? Can you understand how helpless I feel?

Keep moving ahead, stop for nothing; Taipei's pedestrians know that with nothing ventured, there's nothing gained.

Give the earth's surface to the cars, and let the pedestrians scurry around them. （photo by Pu Hua-chih）