I don't see why car ownership is necessary to reduce Third World poverty. When I think of the poverty-related problems that most need solving, I think of malnutrition, bad sanitation, unclean water, lack of electricity, terrible working conditions. A car is a luxury item for middle class people. I've been in Mexico, which has a very extensive bus network, it is quite possible to get around just fine with a good public transportation system.

A car is just a convenience, a luxury item, a status symbol. Which carries the disadvantage of being wasteful of resources, damaging the environment, encouraging wasteful land use, and requiring massive investments in roads to be at all workable. Also, once the middle class abandons public transportation, its quality declines- look at what happened in the US.

So no, I don't see any conflict, in this instance, between the environment and reducing poverty. All I see is disastrous possibility of introducing American-style car culture to India.

I'm with you up to a point, but apparently being able to get around "just fine" isn't the deciding factor in reducing poverty, given your example of Mexico. And many jobs are dependant on having personal transportation--taxis, deliveries, etc. Plus, if the person can get a car of their own they don't have to rely on their lousy government to carry through on the promise of building and maintaining reliable public transit. (Note how public transit in most all of the third world is notoriously unreliable.) Bottom line is your way works in a Utopia, but in the real world these people are going to look out for themselves because they know good and well nobody else is going to do it for them.

First off, Mexican public transportation is quite high in quality, such that in many ways it puts American public transportation to shame. It is reliable, efficient, and (if you pay a bit extra) fairly comfortable. You can get pretty much anywhere you want to, and unless its to some poor tiny village, you can do it in reasonable comfort. Mexico has poverty problems, but I don't think they relate to people being unable to get around. Those who do have problems getting around, because they can't afford the buses, are unlikely to be able to buy cars.

By the way, most Mexican public transportation seems to be run by private companies. The American situation of lousy public transport run by underfunded city agencies is a result of the American situation of it being mainly used by a poor minority.

In places where fewer own cars, taxis are likely to be more lucrative- witness New York City, or Mexico for that matter.

If a poor country has terrible public transportation, its probably because its so miserably poor it can't afford a decent one. In which case I suppose cars are a solution for the tiny minority that are able to afford them.

Personally, If I were India or China, I would be investing in improved public transportation and discouraging private car use. Is it really a good idea, at this moment of surging oil prices, for these countries to be increasing their dependence on foreign oil?

Once again, the conflict is not between allieviating poverty and preserving the environment, but between preserving the environment and third world upper middle class people attaining the conveniences and luxuries that we have in the first world.

In Costa Rica, most people don't own cars, most houses are small and humble, and in terms of consumer goods ownership a "middle class" Costa Rican would be below many American poor people. Yet they have life expectancy, literacy, and infant mortality on a par with developed nations. If we want to end Third World poverty, that seems like a better route, because if they try to become like the US there won't be enough resources and it will kill the environment.

Car ownership would definetly reduce poverty, especially the Nano which is marketed specifically NOT as a luxury item but as a utilitarian vehicle for lower-income families.

That said, you're right that public transportation is a better investment, both in terms of the environmental impact and the effectiveness of empowering poor people.

My guess is that this is a case of the private sector beating the public sector. It's probably easier for a company to throw it's weight around in the market and appeal to consumers than it is to deal with the bureacracy of the Indian government to expand municipal transportation.

I found personal transportation essential. Life w/o was poor, hard, your opportunties are limited to whats in walking reach. Mass trsnsportation is good sometimes, except mostly there is none, they do not go where you need to go often, or not when you need to get there, and it takes hours to to travel as far as you can get in minutes because they wander all over the place, istead of taking you directly to where you need to be.. Don't tell me about some city or country where it works sorta, look around at all the places it does not work. It's a wonderfull supplement, to be replaced asap with your own auto.

To everyone who says "personal cars will definitely reduce poverty," can I get an explanation? New York City seems to do just fine. And there are significant portions of other cities, in and outside the US, where cars are more trouble than their worth. If you could get around on a train or a bus, where you have productive time reading or napping, wouldn't you choose that? Rather than having to pay for gas and maintenance and insurance and taxes and an eventual replacement? Keep in mind, the Nanos are made to fall apart, with ball bearings that can't handle significant speeds.

And if we're looking to the US for comparison, shall we not forget that GM did considerably lobbying (and quite charitable funding the work to tear out streetcar lines, for instance) in order to get us addicted to our cars.

Is it really in the best interest of the poor to have WORSE air and WORSE traffic and WORSE safety (they already can barely cross streets) and MORE expenses besides? And that's not to mention the waste disposal problem that'll come with broken cars people can't afford to fix, left wherever they stopped running. Or the walls of scrap tires (for which we can look to Mexico <link> that breed mosquitoes and snakes?

Governments were invented to protect the public good. That the Nano isn't being challenged by the government or those who pretend to care for the poor (in India or any of the multitude of poverty-stricken nations that are just going to get much worse with global warming) is a mistake. Walkable cities, well-planned, with public transportation is the answer -- for the US as well as anywhere else.

One of the ancient empires in Ethiopia had a tent city as its capital because it had to change locations every five months (and not come back to that site for 10 years) because they exhausted the local resources so completely. Unfortunately, finding a new earth, that's proving to be a challenge ...

And I should add, in relation to government's authority to regulate car ownership (through taxation or whatever means), that it's government (at various levels) who will ultimately be held responsible for providing and maintaining not just roads, but also road safety and parking.

how do cars reduce poverty? That's a really good question. The shortest form is that personal mobility increases your choices. Public transport reduces choice by limiting the time you can travel, where you can travel, and how much you can carry. The distance from a public transit stop affects the value of real estate and the number of retail outlets possible. The closer you are to the stop, the more valuable the property and therefore the more expensive the goods. But let's look at something simple like food.

With the car, you can pick up a whole weeks worth of groceries for a fairly large family in a single trip. The first benefit is that the labor that would've been spent making daily trips to a market has been freed up for other uses either within the family, going to school, or working a second job. The second benefit is that you can travel to the market with the best prices thereby saving yourself cash. It may not be cheaper overall (car plus remote market) but it improves your cash flow. It may also improve the quality of your diet because you might be able to find a market with better produce than the one around the corner. another way of saying this is that it exposes your local market to more competition.

last, and I consider this the most important thing, a car enables you to leave the city. Public transit works fine within the city but if you want to get out to where it's nice, nothing beats a car except maybe a motorcycle.

I will also suggest you might be asking the wrong question. Public transportation is seen as a solution because of its improved energy efficiency. It has serious negative connotations for personal freedom and economic mobility. For example, all those people streaming through a limited number of gateways is great for automatic surveillance.

the question you probably should ask is what is better for society, individual decentralize transportation system or a centralized regimented transportation system? before reducing this to cars versus subways, what if we had individual transport devices capable of traveling 100 miles creating little or no pollution? The answer to this in the small comes from China. Low-cost electric bicycles ($350 US) turned out to be cheaper to run and faster than public transportation. Now imagine the difference in traffic flow and the value of property with and without electric bicycles. Now try to extrapolate that to a device which lets you travel hundreds of miles with little or no carbon footprint.

I believe you'll find that if it wasn't for the carbon footprint, individual personal transport has a major set of wins for individuals and society. Freedom of transport, increased retail competition greater range of education opportunities, greater range of entertainment opportunities are just some of the benefits. Yes, sprawl, traffic, etc. are unpleasant side effects. But in trying to eliminate those side effects, you also need to ask the right questions such as "why do people reject urban areas for living?", "if public transport is so good, why is it subsidized and still very expensive?" and "why are slums the fastest growing parts of cities in the world?" therein lies a very different discussion but one place to start is looking at the differential costs of housing. Rough numbers show that it's you can support a gasoline powered car for approximately 10 to 20 years on the difference in costs of housing between suburban and urban living space.

We're talking about cars in the Third World and you set forth the example of...NEW YORK CITY? Best of luck drawing comparisons between The Big Apple and India. New York is an anomaly even among American cities--none of the New York examples hold true for our second largest city, LA, for example.

On the topic of urban living and the density of cities, I found an article from a couple years back comparing Atlanta and Barcelona. The anti-sprawl crowd likes to argue that denser cities mean less car travel, and that is certainly true, but the results aren't always as dramatic as you might assume. For Atlanta to reach the population density of Barcelona, all the projected new residents for the next 20 years would all have to be housed within the city's current footprint. Yet, even in Barcelona, a little over 50% of all outings are done via automobile.

Also, back to the New York example listed above. According to US Census data from 2003, 54% of households did not have access to a vehicle for private use. (That meant close to 4 million people in the city did have access to a car.) India's population is over one billion. So, even if they emulate New York, that will still be a whole lot of Nanos on the road.