Bangkok and Los Angeles are both known as "The City of Angels", but apart from sharing a name, what else do they have in common? In particular, what specific lifestyle problems are they both facing, and what lessons can be learned from their respective approaches to address those problems?
To begin with, the Bangkok and LA metropolitan areas are similar in size. Bangkok and the heavily urbanised parts of adjacent provinces have 15 million people and Greater Los Angeles 16 million. As large conurbations, both face many similar challenges, especially gridlocked traffic. But they are also very different in many ways: LA's seemingly endless urban sprawl contrasts sharply with Bangkok's densely packed inner city.
However, those in charge of administering these megacities face a number of common management problems in trying to provide a decent quality of life. These include chronic air pollution, caused in large part by engine emissions from vehicles stuck on choked roads and the logistical challenges of providing sustainable utility services such as sanitation, clean water and transport.
Are there lessons for Bangkok to learn from LA's approach to dealing with air pollution and gridlocked traffic?
Los Angeles has the most congested road system in the US — any Bangkok driver can easily relate to the suffering of the typical LA commuter. Traffic and pollution are among the issues that prompted the introduction of the Green LA initiative in 2007. The goal was to address environmental challenges including those of water, waste and transport and turn LA into "a model of an energy-efficient city".
LA's approach to its transport challenges has been to focus primarily on facilitating mobility for its citizens. Specifically, the city has targeted a number of objectives including:
- completing a city-wide traffic light control and synchronisation system;
- increasing the availability of shuttle-bus services from the airport and other key transport hubs;
- converting shuttle buses to alternative fuel consumption;
- displaying public transit information in multiple languages;
- expanding use of the city employee ride-share programme;
- promoting walking and bicycling to work;
- developing the regional rail network capacity.
There are 6 million vehicles on the road in Greater LA, and despite California's legislative attempts at emission controls, the sheer scale of the problem means pollution reduction has been a struggle at best and a losing battle at worst.
In response to this reality, the city has focused specifically on cleaning up the worst of the polluters: buses, trucks and sanitation vehicles, starting with all vehicles owned by the city, and then with those owned by private businesses that use the busy local ports.
In fact, LA was the first US city to use fuel-cell technology in its vehicles, as part of its Alternative Fuel Fleet. The initial target of having 85% of all city-owned vehicles (garbage trucks, road-sweepers, cars, buses) powered by alternative fuels was met by the end of 2013.
While cleaning up its own act, the city has turned its focus on others that pollute, particularly the estimated 16,000 trucks, mostly diesel-powered, which use the harbour area. The ports of LA and Long Beach handle nearly half of all the containers that enter the US, with three-fold growth in container traffic predicted over the next decade. More worryingly, the Ports area accounts for nearly 25% of toxic air emissions, more than what is created by all 6 million cars in the region.
The initial "Clean Trucks" programme set a target of completing the "greening" of all trucks that use the harbour area over five years from 2007-12. All trucks had to meet the 2007 US Environmental Protection Agency diesel truck emissions standards or be replaced. Doing so would cut truck diesel emissions by a staggering 80%. The LA Harbor Authority ensured there would be enough money to pay for the necessary retrofitting by collecting a US$35 fee for each container entering or leaving the port by truck.
LA has set its sights firmly on improving emission controls and thereby helping to improve overall air quality, but what similar transport challenges face Bangkok, and how is the city responding to them?
The Land Transport Department estimates 6.5 million vehicles were registered in Bangkok in 2010, roughly the same number as in LA. However, Thailand does not have California's strict emissions laws on the books. The UN Environment Programme says that as a result, Bangkok is one of the world's most polluted cities, with transport contributing nearly 40% of that pollution.
The negative impact of Bangkok's automobile emissions on the environment is even starker when you consider that the residents of the city are not great polluters in themselves, rating on a par with New York and less than the residents of Toronto, a city of 3 million, in terms of the volume of carbon dioxide produced each year. However, Toronto is a city I lived in for many years, and I can assure you the quality of air there is a million times better than the carbon dioxide cocktail that Bangkok residents have to ingest on a daily basis.
So what would a city such as Bangkok really need to do in order to change the current engine emissions pollution scenario radically? I'll look at this challenge in the second article in this series.
Niall Sinclair is director of KM at Bangkok University's Institute for Knowledge and Innovation. He is also author of the KM best-seller 'Stealth KM' and founder of Nterprise Consulting in Ottawa. He can be reached at niall.s@bu.ac.th and nterprise@rogers.com