It seemed the west was more than just meeting the east when the Chinese district of Fujian Quanzhou suddenly discovered that its car numbers had leaped far beyond the experts’ wildest predictions.
Traffic control in this formerly quiet part of the orient had been about pedestrians, and bicycles. Now the urban council has found that the roads are carrying much more motorised traffic. One report showed the number of cars in a single district this year had increased by 4,600.
When the experts recovered from the shock, and did their sums, they announced that the next year would see 90,000 new vehicles. How many will be motorbikes and what percentage will have four-wheels? The experts have been unable to say.
The cause is blamed, like almost every other change in this most ancient part of the world, on the influence of western scenes on television. Suddenly, people discover than nobody in America seems to walk any more.
The Fujian Quanzhou district traffic police chief was taking the discovery badly. He told reporters he was “heavy-hearted” about what the obvious demand next year will require of traffic control.
He said, “The question of the cause is inferior to how we are going to manage the extra pressure on the roads. The consequence of this increase could be disastrous.”
He is calling for the building of new roads in a district where few roads have been built in a thousand years or so.
Interestingly, the new roads he envisages will include huge pedestrian ways too. At least, the new highways sound as if they are planned for walkers. There is no talk of centre lines and yellow no stopping lines. It is possible remote parts of China are so far behind in the traffic world that prohibiting cars from stopping is as unimaginable as it must have been in England and Europe fifty years ago.
However, the authorities realise that when cars stop – particularly with the sudden vast increase in motor traffic – they have to park somewhere.
So big new car parks are planned. Not such a problem, you might think, in such a vast continent. However, the difficulty is that such things have never even been thought of before.
A question bothering authorities in the towns of Tian An Lu, and Tianjin Huai, is the damage vehicles will cause when they stop beside the road. The damage? Officials explain that they mean cars will be parked on the paths where people walk.
Somehow, the planners haven’t yet heard about curbs. They know of roads and beside the roads, footpaths, or the American, “sidewalk”. But they don’t know yet about the piece in between, where rainwater swirls away - when it can get passed the wheels of parked cars.
A district council spokesman tried to explain that they have to decide if cars will be allowed to stop beside the roads, because of the cost of the damage when they do.
But of course, the cars will have to stop because the owners will want to shop, or go into the office, or even go to bed. Therefore, he said, the planners have to accept that the destruction of new sidewalks is unavoidable. In effect, they must build disposable footpaths.
This motorising of the country areas of China produces other quaint problems for district authorities. What about garages for people to put their cars in? The official asked the question as if it were something quite new to civilised people.
In Quanzhou urban district, for instance, there have been some big new housing schemes. Although it was anticipated that new residents would want to own cars, the architects had not thought of providing “car houses”, and it seems that the idea of what we call off-street parking had not occurred to them either.
But now many of the residents have cars, and they want to keep them out of the weather when they are not in use. How will the authorities answer this?
“There are no provisions for garages,” a town-planning spokesman said. “We can do no more than assure them that future housing areas will be designed with this fashionable design in mind, and the vehicle class will be catered for.”
In larger country cities, the needs of the “car class” are somewhat more demanding, and more of the present time.
Quanzhou, badly hit by the rise of the driving classes, has been forced to come up with immediate and huge answers. A 2,000 car parking lot is being built near the centre of the town. On the outskirts, a ten square kilometre park is to be constructed. In the district, twenty more public parking lots are being provided.
Even in such a huge country, finding space close enough to towns in another matter. Airfields are being taking over and areas under bridges are being set aside. Quite a lot of land is being given over to the car in this plan.
But the authorities say that this will answer only the immediate need. There are some revolutionary ideas in the air. Parking buildings are envisaged – called quaintly “three-dimensional parking answers” and new laws to tell the motorist where and when he can and can’t stop. For older readers, it must sound strangely nostalgic.
Hats off to the Chinese. Before they get tough on bad parkers, there must be adequate parking. From the sounds of things, the motorist in the Chinese countryside could be safe from parking tickets for a decade or two yet.
A traffic police chief said, “We will be strict, have no doubt about it. But we must be fair. If there is nowhere authorised for the car class to park, it would be undemocratic to find them guilty of bad motoring.”
If only the authorities in our West democracies felt the same way. Perhaps these new motoring classes have something to teach us.
