Wenzhou and Christians in China

One of the magazines I read regularly is Prospect. In the March issue Jack Straw, an ex-minister from the Labour government in the UK, reviews a book called Civilisation: the West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.

In the review it emerges that there is a large Protestant community in Wenzhou, just south of Shanghai, in the Zhejiang region. I find the size and prosperity of such a place in the midst of a large officially atheist country rather surprising, although I had heard previously that Christianity was growing vigorously in China.

So here are a few facts which might interest you:

• Wenzhou, with a population of 8 million, is reputed to be the most enterprising city in China

• There is a community based around 1,339 state-approved churches (although I’ve seen higher figures cited elsewhere).

•  This and other religious communities in China, ‘double both as credit networks and supply chains of creditworthy, trustworthy fellow believers.’

The Chinese government are very much concerned about corruption and potential instability, especially in the event that economic growth falters. The powers that be may be holding off in their customery persecution of religion because they have some interest in letting such Christ-centred networks prosper and perhaps do for China what the Protestant business and innovation networks did for the USA and parts of Europe. In fact a recent BBC report suggests the Chinese government is actually partially financing new churches and Christian social work (e.g. care for the elderly).

History is full of the totally unexpected. There are now more Christians (around 100 million in all) than members of the Communist Party (70 million). It will be interesting to see if the current rate of growth continues.

John

Author, 2077 AD

Has road traffic in the West peaked?

Transport planners assume economic growth and car use go together; an assumption which is certainly true for the developing world.  And because the latter accounts for most of the world population the overall link between prosperity and car use looks likely to continue, unless some unforeseen factor, like an environmental or fuel crisis, sets in. China, e.g., is forecast to have more cars on the road than the USA by 2030 (Economic Policy, 2008).

Over the last six months or so, speaking to fellow drivers in the UK, there seems to be anecdotal evidence that the roads have become noticeably less busy. I also read a couple of news items which seemed to support this. A temporary blip in the upward trend?

Then I came across an article by James Crabtree in the May issue of Prospect which suggests a long term decline in private automobile use not only in the UK but in much of the west could have started.

This article reports that at the end of 2010 Lee Schipper (University of California, Berkeley) and Adam Millard-Ball  (Stanford, California) finished a study of traffic in 8 countries, including the UK. It was entitled ‘Are we reaching peak travel?’  It found that from 2003 the long established correlation between prosperity and travel broke down abruptly, with the mileage per vehicle falling. Schipper and Millard-Ball guessed this was due to congestion and rising fuel costs.

A study by Phil Goodwin et al at Oxford University suggests a more radical trend, at least in the UK. Government travel surveys show that from around 1995 the growth in  miles travelled per car had begun first to slow and then to reverse. The number of trips per car is also falling.

The number of young people driving in the UK is declining quite steeply. The percentage of 17-20 year olds with driving licenses fell from 48 to 36% between the early 1990s and 2007.

Renault, BMW, Audi and other companies are taking this seriously, apparently, as they plan how to sell transport technology to the coming generation.

Maybe young people are more interested in surfing the web and communicating through social networks than living the lifestyles of their parents while paying enormous insurance premiums, fuel charges and interest on car loans. It could also be connected with the steeply rising numbers of university students in the UK.

Whether this is the start of a long term trend we cannot be certain but western governments and the motor industry need to stop assuming ever rising use of the private car as a foregone conclusion.

John

Author, 2077 AD

Getting around via the Magnificent 7

Our present method of getting from A to B is based largely on  door-to-door transport by private automobile.

It is not surprising that most people use their own automobile, sitting in comfort, listening to music or talk, or just conversing with a passenger, rather than venture onto public transport. Just jump in, turn the ignition and you’re off.

However, either through war or resource depletion, this will not always be sustainable as the main way of getting people around a country. Not only is it fuel inefficient it is also resource hungry: manufacturing of millions of automobiles each year uses huge amounts of water, metals, plastics, glass and energy.

So how might personal transport be tackled in future?  It may be just a matter of marrying together two technologies: transport technology and information technology.

Transport technology. In going from A to B you have to adopt one or more of 7 modes of transport:  train, aircraft, metro, tram, bus, taxi or automobile. Let’s call them the Magnificent 7.  Each part of the journey (e.g. from door to station by taxi or from station X to station Y by train) has to be separately negotiated, planned and paid for. This can be troublesome and time consuming.

Information technology. In the last decade there has been a revolution in information technology in much of the world. We are connected up by mobile phones, laptops and PCs via the Internet and various phone networks based on a labyrinth of transmitters, copper wires and optical fibres. Banks, businesses and individuals are all interconnected. The evolution of computer, switching and propagation hardware has gone hand in hand with an ability to write extraordinarily powerful software.

Combining the two. In principle any journey via one or more of the Magnificent 7 (e.g. a trip involving a taxi, a train and a bus) can be modelled by software and optimised for the customer.  The potential traveller is presented with a few journey options, including total duration and cost, to choose from.

The cost per mile to the customer should be lower because of the larger usage of public transport, improved overall efficiency and cross subsidisation. All the forms of transport could be electronically interconnected to each other, to each potential customer and to the banks. GPS could be used to monitor the customer’s position and just one, universal type of swipe card could be used throughout the Magnificent 7.

How might this work out in practice?

Suppose I wanted to travel from my house to a house 200 miles (320 km) away - today, starting in the next hour. I type in my destination on a smart phone and the system comes up with 3 routes costing different amounts and with different journey times.

 Having chosen a journey plan a taxi arrives. I pay using a swipe card. It deposits me at the rail station where I use the same swipe card. A fast train covers the bulk of the journey, is spacious and comfortable, and at the other end the same card is used to pay for a minibus to my final destination. No fumbling with notes and because the driver gets a living wage one is spared the nuisance of tipping (still a common practice in the west).

It might even be possible to integrate one’s own car into such a system to enable sharing with strangers, providing they are willing to take the risk (e.g. of hearing me ranting about my latest blog) at some standard rate per mile.

Overall, the energy consumption per passenger mile should be greatly reduced as the hurtling of a monstrous gas gulper up a motorway (freeway) at high speed with a single stressed-out occupant became an anachronism or even a surreal memory.

 Do we have to wait for an oil crisis? Global warming is enough of a problem to justify emergency action starting yesterday.

John

Author, 2077 AD