28% of city households have car
Print Edition
ALMOST a third of Shanghai households have at least one car, and demand is still growing, according to a comprehensive city transport study published yesterday.
Last October, 28 percent of Shanghai households had at least one car — a total of nearly 3.2 million, the fifth comprehensive study by the Shanghai Transportation Commission found.
This was almost double the number of cars in the city in 2009, when the fourth study was conducted.
And there are no signs of this abating, the survey found.
It found that 8 percent of existing car owners and 10 percent of households that don’t have a car planned to buy a new vehicle within two years.
This would see an extra 400,000 cars of Shanghai’s roads every year.
Yet the city only issues 100,000 car plates a year, through auction.
This sees many car owners resort to non-local car plates, even though vehicles with these face restrictions on city roads.
Nearly 1 million cars in Shanghai have non-local plates.
Meanwhile, the shortage of parking spaces in residential areas is increasingly apparent, the survey found.
Shanghai has only 640,000 parking spaces in downtown residential areas, while demand is for 1.33 million.
This has seen motorists park at roadsides near their homes or in non-residential car parks.
Inevitably, the increase in cars number has brought pressure to the city’s roads.
The study found that there is congestion in downtown areas as early as 7am, while the speed on some roads has fallen below 10 miles an hour.
To ease congestion, in April, Shanghai banned vehicles with out-of-town plates from using the city’s expressways during rush hour.
This has proved effective, said officials.
They point out that the city was ranked the eighth-most congested city in China in the second quarter.
For the previous six quarters it had been among the top three most congested cities.
But as more vehicles take to the roads the situation is set to worsen again.
“The policy works for now, but its effect will reduce as time passes,” Xue Meigeng, a researcher with the city’s transport planning institution told Shanghai Daily.
Not surprising considering the popularity of online shopping, the study found that the delivery industry is thriving.
Some 100 million packages were delivered each day in Shanghai in 2014, 2.8 times the 2009 figure.
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