BANGKOK, Thailand - They called it ``the mother of all traffic jams.''
The place was Bangkok. The occasion was a four-day
national holiday
marking the start of the rainy season in Thailand last April.
Richard Frankel, an environmental engineer in
Bangkok, recalled the
scene:
``On Wednesday night we figured we would try
to beat the traffic and get
out of town. We planned to drive to Chiang Mai, 200 miles north,
and spend
the holiday there. So we packed up the car, fed everyone and took
off from
the house. Our plan was to drive on the expressway around Bangkok,
continue
out past the airport and then head north. We left the house at 10
p.m. The
kids were asleep in the back seat, everything was perfect - until
we hit the
expressway. The traffic was backed up bumper to bumper for 60 miles.
By
10 the next morning, we had only reached the airport, just a few
miles from
our house. Some people abandoned their cars. We finally managed
to turn
around and spent the holiday at home.''
Bangkok today represents the dark side of the
Asian economic miracle.
It is the story of what happens when a country imports free-market
capitalism, but without the governing structures that go with it
to
regulate growth.
More people per capita drive Mercedes Benzes in
Bangkok than anywhere in
the world, and more people per capita cannot enjoy their Mercedes
Benzes in
Bangkok because they are always stuck in traffic. Many Bangkok drivers
won't leave home without a mobile phone and a portable potty in
their car.
Bangkok is a city of 10 million people with so
little central planning
that it not only has no subway system, it doesn't even have a carpool
lane.
Everybody seems to have a car or motorbike and everybody drives.
Only
last year did Bangkok get its first small waste-water treatment
facility, but
most of the town still throws its garbage, and flushes its toilets,
untreated, into the city's canals.
Most people have stopped entertaining on weeknights
because of the
uncertainty when guests might arrive.
``All the spontaneity of life is gone,'' says
an environmental journalist,
James Fahn. ``You can't just call up your buddy and say `Let's meet
at a
restaurant in 15 minutes.''' Rich city, poor life. It is the lament
of Asia's
boom towns.
The traditional argument from developing countries
has been, ``We'll
make our mess now and clean it up later when we can afford it.''
But as Bangkok demonstrates, when a city grows
as fast as it has, there
may be no later. Many sidewalks are already gone. There is no room
left for
new parks. Canals have been cemented over for new buildings. The
fish in the
river are dead. Half the traffic cops have respiratory problems.
In Bangkok, the free market overran the government
or grew so much
richer than the government that it could buy off every environmental
regulation
with corruption. This country is in bad need of some Big Government.
As one U.S. diplomat in Thailand remarked to me:
``We've just opened a
dozen or so new embassies in the former Soviet Union, and our job
there is to
explain to people that there is something called `a market.' Our
job in
Thailand is to explain to people that there is something other than
the
market.''
I fear that in Thailand the government will never
catch up to the
market. The only hope now is the market - that businesses here will
conclude that
pollution and traffic are not just environmental problems, but economic
problems. A 1990 study found that Thai children, by the age of 7,
had lost
six points off their average IQs as a result of breathing the air
in Bangkok.
As Bangkok's Governor Krisda explained to me,
10 years ago Thailand
attracted foreign investment because it was a good place for cheap,
unregulated
labor.
But now China and Vietnam are capturing those
factories, and Thailand,
to succeed, has to move upscale and attract the knowledge-based,
high-tech
industries of the 21st century.
``To have that knowledge economy we need foreign
investors, and they
won't come to live in a town where it takes three hours to travel
somewhere by
car,'' he said. ``They will not have their kids grow up breathing
bad air. In
order for Thailand to get to that next stage we have to have a livable
city.
There was a time that people thought we could not develop economically
if we are a green city. I don't think we can survive economically
if we are
NOT a green city.''