Traffic congestion is on the rise in Macao, a situation that every resident experiences on a daily basis, whether he or she is a driver or a simple pedestrian having to hop on a bus or just cross the street while humming a carbon dioxide enriched SAR air. Many culprits are of course to be blamed, but recent figures released by the DSEC on the number of new vehicles being put on the road every month has found a disturbing and overemphasized echo in the news, as if the end user — the car driver — was the chief culprit and therefore had to be disciplined by imposing more stringent taxes on the licensing of new vehicles.
Looking at the official figures, one first realizes that there are a lot of vehicles on the roads of Macao and that new registrations are on the rise, by 5% officially year-on-year for a total 210,580 vehicles (112,644 motorcycles, 91,326 light automobiles and 6,610 heavy automobiles) at the end of June 2012 — a journalist from the Portuguese press made the calculation that “some 21 new vehicles invade the streets of our little territory every day”. But then, how do we compare? If one looks at Hong Kong, there were 425,000 licensed private cars in June 2011, whereas the equivalent figure for Macao was 78,000: a ratio of about 1/5.5 whereas the population ratio between the two SARs is about 1/13.3. Not too bad for Macao.
A more common ratio however does not refer to the total population or even the number of drivers but to the number of kilometers of public roads. In Hong Kong, this figure is widely available — 293 vehicles (not counting motorcycles) per public road kilometer — whereas for Macao I had to reconstruct the ratio by looking at Chapter 13 of the Yearbook, where one can find two figures for the total number of kilometers of road: either 311 kilometers of roads and highways (this figure being also the one advertised in the cover page of the chapter) or 413 kilometers of roads and highways “for vehicles”. We therefore end up with respectively 315 or 237 vehicles per kilometer of public roads. In either case, that ratio is not that bad — hence my wonder as to why we have two figures and what they mean exactly, either in English or in Chinese — as we fare well in the range of Hong Kong or even Singapore and Tokyo, and far better than Taipei, for example, that stands at more than 1,000 vehicles per kilometer of roads.
Is the total number of vehicles really the main culprit then? Will increasing the taxes just like in Singapore where taxes on new car licensing amount to more than the price of the car really the solution? Is imposing quotas and selling new plates at public auctions as it has been the case in Shanghai since the 1990s the way to go (average price for a new plate standing at more than RMB50,000)? Luckily enough in Macao there is no contradiction between our aspiration to live a better and cleaner life and the necessity to boost our automobile industry, so it is high time to say that the real solution lies in having a far-reaching and meaningful urban development master plan coupled to an integrated public transportation service that makes private vehicles “unwelcome” in our streets, even though they comply by Euro VI standards (and not only Euro IV as it has just been decided). There is no more time for compromise!
Published in Macau Daily Times, August 3rd 2012
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