In pursuit of modernization the Beijing municipal government is widening roads, building freeways and encouraging the purchase of personal cars. I would like to give the city I love a heartfelt suggestion: Beijing should avoid adopting America's reliance on cars and freeways, which has been the greatest mistake in America's urban development in the last century. If Beijing continues to add roads and promote private ownership of cars, future generations will regret this almost irreversible choice, as many Americans do today. I am a Yale student who lived in Beijing a few years ago; I hope my opinion will be helpful in improving the city's traffic flow and transportation system for the 2008 Olympics.

　　I grew up near Los Angeles in southern California, a region strangled by highways, the blight of American cities and the landscape. When I was in Los Angeles a few months ago, I noted that more than 75% of the ground was covered in pavement or asphalt roads and parking lots. The city is designed on the scale of cars and not people, making it inconvenient to walk almost anywhere. It is common for Angelenos to spend two hours commuting to work and school every day. Those who can't drive are the most marginalized -- the poor who cannot afford cars, children who are isolated in suburban enclaves, and the elderly. Recently an old man crashedsintosan outdoor market in Los Angeles, killing 10 people. America's lack of public transportation means that when the elderly cannot drive, they cannot even go shopping.

　　How did Los Angeles and many other American cities become oceans of asphalt,swheresno one can buy a sandwich without using a car? A combination of factors: government subsidization of roads and highways more than public transportation, powerful auto, oil and tire corporations, and a culture that glamorized the automobile. Beginning in the 1930s, dozens of American cities, including Los Angeles, sold off their trolley systems, while government poured moneysintosroad construction. Then at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, the US government made the misguided decision to build highways as a defense strategy, assuming suburbanization would protect the nation from catastrophic loss of life in the event of nuclear war.

　　Rightsintosthe 1980s Los Angeles widened roads in an effort to relieve traffic congestion. Unfortunately, city planners learned too late that the wider the roads were, the farther apart major buildings became, and thus the farther people had to drive. It may seem counterintuitive①to Beijingers today, but American urbanists now recognize that traffic expands to fill the roads. The effect of car-reliant transportation systems on cities is "urban sprawl" -- undesirable horizontal rather than vertical growth. America's most livable cities are San Francisco, Boston and New York, which not coincidentally are among the few American cities with high urban density and good public transportation as well as good parks②.

　　Reliance on cars is bad for society, the economy and the environment. In American suburbs the young, the elderly and the poor lack mobility. Time is wasted in driving cars, material resources in producing them. Too many cars and highways are bad for the environment because they cause low-density development to take over land, degrading natural areas and using land inefficiently. The nation's economic dependence on petroleum is a severe problem caused by our individual dependence on cars.

　　China should learn from the mistakes of the United States. Study the high-speed trains spanning France and the subways of London, Paris, Singapore and Tokyo as models of transportation systems. And investigate the promising high-tech Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which seems to be as efficient as a subway but at 5% the cost to build. Kunming already enjoys BRT③, and Pudong will be building a system soon. If Beijing goes ahead with development based on the automobile, it will be very hard to ensure that urban life there is pleasant.