No driving allowed in Beijing next month

The roads in Beijing are even more congested than in Shanghai. The Shanghai Daily writes that according to Beijing’s Road Traffic Management 90% of all roads are at full capacity, which seems a bit high to me. The paper does not question this figure, but likely they only look at the average for major roads during certain time periods.

But statistics aside, the roads in Beijing are indeed overloaded and it’s getting worse by the day. Literally, because each day 1000 cars are added to the Beijing car population. During next year’s Olympic Games this will be a major problem, because there will be 350,000 extra cars on the road – and now already Beijing is gridlocked.

Therefore during the Olympics many cars will not be allowed to drive in the city. And in order to rehearse that, the Beijing government has decided to close the road for 1 million Beijing cars next month! But according to a spokesman for Road Traffic Management this will cause little inconvenience. His logic: Students will be staying home for the summer holiday and working people can take public transport. Well Mr. Spokesman, you probably don’t have a car yourself so it won’t be an inconvenience for you, but navigating Beijing by bus or subway is not the most convenient way of traveling in the middle of summer. That’s exactly why most people bought a car in the first place.

I think Shanghai is doing a much better job in this respect. The subway infrastructure is already very good, and more lines are added each year. And for cars you pay a one-time license plate fee of more than USD 5,000, making sure that not everybody rushes to buy a car. Maybe Beijing should consider a fee system as well: charge an amount of money for car usage during this period. This gives people a choice instead of forcing them to abandon their cars during the hottest period of the year. Given the price sensitivity of the average Chinese, this may actually work pretty well.