CITY AUTHORITIES in the Chinese capital Beijing have capped the number of new cars in the gridlocked city to 240,000 this year as they try to cope with the city’s drastic pollution problem.
The nation’s capital is choked with smog, much of it caused by the swelling fleet of new cars clogging the streets of Beijing, making gridlock a grim byproduct of the country’s burgeoning economy.
An IBM survey showed that Beijing and Mexico City are the world’s worst commutes.
Under the new rules, a Beijing driver will be permitted to own no more than one car, while car owners who replace their old vehicles will automatically be entitled to new plates and will not have to take part in a lottery for new plates.
“Licence plates will be similar to ID cards,” said Meng Qiao, deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport. “The licence plate will remain with the car, whether it is sold or destroyed.”
Air quality has been getting dramatically worse as people rush to use their new-found wealth to buy a long dreamed-of car in this city of 19 million people. The days when Beijing was a city of bicycles are long gone; these days even the humble two-wheeler has been replaced by an electric bike.
A drive across the city yesterday said it all. Normally a Sunday and a public holiday would be relatively calm; instead we witnessed four fender benders and traffic was rush-hour heavy on the ring roads.
Beijing has 4.76 million vehicles, up from 2.6 million in 2005; by 2012 it will have seven million vehicles, according to official statistics provided by the municipal transportation authorities.
Overall vehicle sales in China this year are expected to exceed 20 million units. Perhaps not surprisingly, driving conditions are increasingly hazardous too.
One Chinese commuter who has studied in Europe said: “The reason there are so many of these prangs is because the roads are full of people who only got their driving licences within the last five years. It’s like the roads are full of teenagers.”
China overtook the United States as the world’s biggest car market in 2009, but the massive rise in the number of cars on the streets has made the roads hazardous, both in Beijing and in other major Chinese cities.
Under the new system, the city will only allow 240,000 new car registrations in 2011 – two-thirds fewer than last year – through a monthly online lottery.
On Thursday, Beijing launched five new underground metro lines to try and improve the public transport system and take some of the pressure off the city’s infrastructure. Within 10 minutes of the new lottery starting, 6,000 people had applied for new plate numbers and there were more than 50,000 applicants by 5pm, trying to get the first batch of 20,000 number plates allotted until the end of the month.
In some ways the new rules in Beijing are an effort to catch up with the country’s biggest city, Shanghai, where the municipal government has for many years imposed a licence fee of about 50,000 yuan (€5,700) for each car owned.