More New Cars Than Babies This Year in Mexico City
by Eliza Barclay, Nomad on 10.24.08
For every birth in Mexico City, two new cars enter the city's vehicle fleet each year, according to the Center for Sustainable Transport, or CTS in its Spanish acronym. The non-profit think tank compared the city's birth records to vehicle sales and found that the number of annual births is some 160,000, while the number of new vehicles added to the city's fleet ranges between 200,000 and 300,000, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics, Geography and Informatics, or INEGI.
The solution to the problem is not to build more roads, according to the CTS.
"To make more roads to solve the transit problem is like proposing to solve the problem of obesity by buying bigger pants," said Adriana Lobo, director of the CTS, told Mexico's Milenio newspaper. "It will not eradicate the problem." :: Via Milenio (Spanish link)
More on Mexico City Transport:
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Mexico City Launches "Green Plan"
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This isn't as bad as it sounds. Mexico has a lot of old, inefficient, and highly polluting cars. The faster they can be replaced, the better.
What matters here is the net change in the fleet size. Not how many new cars are purchased.