Dia sin Carro

Yesterday, February 1st, was "car-free day" in Bogota. I first saw it advertised on the front of a Transmilenio bus last week, and asked Panda what it was all about. Apparently, once every 6 to 12 months, the city has a car-free day to reduce air pollution levels. Amusingly enough, buses, the main pollutant producers, are exempt, as are taxis. However, by keeping private cars off the roads, the levels are apparently reduced significantly. I was somewhat taken by the idea: like Ciclovia (where they close a number of major roads to motor traffic on Sunday mornings leaving them free for cycling, roller-blading, and simply strolling) it seemed a rather progressive idea. I resolved to take a walk through the city on that day and see for myself what effect it would have.

The city was transformed. It turned the smoky, noisy, clogged arteries of bogota into relaxed de facto pedestrian byways. Crossing the road was no longer a life-threatening battle of wills with three lanes of speed-limit-defying, fume-belching traffic. Walking along any road, one could hear the birds rather than the constant roar of passing cars. I started from my home, and walked almost 50 blocks towards Panda's university, further than I had originally planned, just savouring the new Bogota which would be available for one day only. On arriving at Panda's university, I joined her and a friend for lunch. Amongst other things, the topic of the dia sin carro came up. Her friend was adamant: the ban had no effect on pollution, yet reduced the economy of Bogota by 40% for that one day. I refrained from asking the source of her statistics -- nor from putting it to her that even if true, was not an attractive ambience to one's city worth the price of a dip in economic productivity? I feared we might come to blows.

And this, I have to say, has been a theme of my interactions with the moneyed classes here. (My interactions with the other classes has, I regret to admit, been limited to thanking them for serving me lunch, or directing me towards the washing powder in Exito.) It seems to be generally accepted that solutions should be personal, not general. Bogota has a pollution problem? Fine: buy a comfortable car, and travel inside of it. Bogota has a crime problem? Fine: live inside of a closed apartment complex, guarded by men in uniforms.

But as ever, being exposed to other ways of thinking is most usefully used to expose the lens through which one views the world oneself, which otherwise remains invisible. I remembered an occasion when I had seen Noam Chomsky lecture in London. His key message was the Zeroth Rule of moral argument (in that case, as applied to the (by his argument, hypocritical) foreign policy of the United States): "Those things which are bad for me, are bad for everyone." Ie, that morals are ubiquitous. It is wrong, at the most basic level, to criticise (or bomb) other countries for engaging in "terrorist activities", whilst committing identical activities oneself. This seemed to me, as it apparently does to Chomsky, fundamental. If the traffic noise in your street bothers you, then the only ethical solution is to band together with your neighbours and campaign for traffic calming methods. It is not simply to buy double glazing.

There is another angle on this too. It is embodied in this phrase from Martin Fowler: "You can change your organization, or change your organization." Ie, either change the way things are done where you are -- or move. Perhaps a traveller, or at least a foreigner living abroad, is more likely to take this attitude. I see that there are states run in different ways. In some states, this universalization of morals is encoded in law. Explicitly, in laws of workplace equality etc, and implicitly, in the nationalisation of public resources and infrastructure. In others, the solution of such problems appears to be left to the individual (with their capacity to solve such problems being directly proportional to their income.)

I notice that this latter approach seems to be favoured in Colombia, and in the U.S. Once, the U.S. had to fight a genuine national threat whose primary ideology happened to be Communist: perhaps this has poisoned it thenceforth from openly accepting Socialist ideologies (at whose core may be the idea of the generalisability of morals.) Colombia's leftwing guerrillas don't even participate in the political process: they hide in the hills, kidnap people, and grow and distribute drugs to fund their war. Perhaps this situation has similarly poisoned ordinary Colombians against such ideas.