Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Traffic along Beijing’s Second Ring Road in late September.

This week I was in Kenya and ended up spending a lot of time sitting in traffic. Even at night, a trip to the Nairobi airport that should have taken 30 minutes took three times that. In reporting trips to large cities of the developing world, I have noticed that one feature most now have in common is this jarring traffic and attendant smog, from Nairobi to New Delhi to Beijing.

In booming Nairobi, I witnessed a common tactic for addressing the traffic problem: road widening and road construction. It seemed like nearly every major road was being enlarged when I was there. As in much of Africa, Chinese contractors are a mainstay of such road-building projects.

“Did anyone look to see how this strategy played out in Beijing?” I complained to a Kenyan colleague. Adding road surface often merely eases the congestion for a brief window of time; in the long run, it can make it worse.

As a reporter for The Times in Beijing from 1997 to 2003, I witnessed the vicious cycle of road building and traffic. My family moved there just after the Third Ring Road has been completed to ease traffic congestion in a rapidly expanding city with ever more wealth and more cars. Traffic flowed like a dream -– for maybe six months.

Read more at The New York Times