University College Dublin UCD Applied Language Centre Pre-Masters Programme 2016/17

Semester I Project (1200 words)

Due Date: Monday 5 December 2016 Time: 2.00pm PLEASE PRINT: NAME (AS ON STUDENT CARD)_______Chufei Chen_______ Please note that plagiarism in any form is forbidden in all examinations, theses, or other academic exercises.

I confirm that this essay is my own unaided work and that all sources are cited.

SIGNED_________________________________________________ DATE SUBMITTED ________________________ (TIME) ___________________ Introduction Urbanization is commonly defined as the increasing number of people that live in urban areas. Today, under the big environment of this, more and more people tend to live in the urban area. According to the United Nations report in 2014, 54 per cent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 66 per cent by 2050. With the continually increased urban population, many problems appear and need to be solved including air pollution, traffic congestion, unemployment etc.

Sustainable development, defined within the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future, was globally defined as: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising that ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987:43). Many developing countries, especially China, pay close attention on sustainability of development in recent years. Chinese government raises the Sustainable Development Theory, which considers sustainability as coordinated, efficient and multidimensional development. A series of policies have been carried out since 2005.

In this essay, I focus on the China Vehicle Limited Policy and analysis to what extent the problems of urbanization can be met by this policy. I select three urbanization problems in different area (economy, environment and society respectively) and identify how Vehicle Limited Policy works.

Case Study 1 The air pollution has been a serious problem for many years in China. The United States Embassy in Beijing even announces “crazy bad” Beijing air pollution and replaced it with the term “beyond index” in 2010. (Watts, J. 2010) Motor vehicle exhaust emission is one of the main factors that cause air pollution. There are hundreds of different compounds in automobile exhaust. Pollutants are suspended particulate matter, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, lead and sulfur compounds, which do harmful to the human body, especially young people and the elderly.

In order to deal with the strong air pollution, a national public transit priority strategy has been put forward since 2005. Chengming Z. , Yanyan C. and Changxi M. defined public transit priority as a very important relieving traffic congestion. Many cities invested heavily in building public transit infrastructure, and a series of upgraded policies to encourage people to take buses and subways. Shanghai has instituted a bidding mechanism (with a reservation price) in allocating licenses to automobile owners for years. The auction opens to the public once a month and the quota fluctuated between 8,000 and 9,000 monthly, and rarely exceeded 10,000 in recent years. (Suwei F. and Qiang L. 2013)Also, the vehicles without local license plates cannot enter the elevated roads or the intra-city expressway system, in order to discourage local public from buying cars in other province. With this restriction in place, the number of registered automobiles grew slower and slower in the last decade. Suwei and Qiang argue that the other advantage of this policy is that the revenues from the auction have been spent on the improvement of ring roads and the development of public transit system.

However, there is a comprehensive factors lead to the air pollution. Generally, the level of dangerous fine particulate matter depends on industrial emissions and motor vehicle emissions of these pollution sources. It also can be influenced by meteorological diffusion condition. For example, in the autumn and winter, affected by wind and humidity conditions, pollutants are more easily accumulate to a high concentration. That is why air pollution is eventually controlled, but cannot be solved completely.

Case Study 2 In recent years, the traffic condition in Chinese mage cities becomes worse and worse. Amap (China's leading digital map content, navigation and location-based services solutions provider) released the “2015 annual Chinese main cities traffic analysis report”. It shows that Beijing peak congestion delay index at 2.06. The average speed of cars is 22.61 km/h, which means, compare with the time that traffic flows smoothly, the Beijing drivers spend two times longer to reach the destination in rush hour. It is the highest congestion time cost in China.