Parking violators running rampant
Print Edition
WHEN I set off on my scooter to the office at 7:30am, the streets are crowded with all manner of vehicles.
Compared with even a year ago, traffic conditions have worsened. Previously, it took me no more than 15 minutes to ride to the office. Now, the same journey takes over 30 minutes. This is thanks, in large part, to frequent stops due to cars occupying bicycle lanes and even thoroughfares.
Official data show we have 3.2 million automobiles in Shanghai. Many people have vowed to introduce congestion charges to reduce the number of automobiles on the streets. But for such a charge to be introduced, it must have a grounding in local legislation. For the time being though, no such foundation exists, a member of the local People’s Congress told Shanghai Daily.
On the other hand, there are plenty of existing laws which could improve matters on the road if officials strictly enforced them. If traffic control officers, aided by surveillance cameras and other technologies, pasted tickets on more illegally parked cars, the number of vehicles on the road would be reduced.
In fact, increased ticketing could represent an effective strategy when it comes to combating traffic, since the fine for illegal parking starts at 200 yuan (US$31.50), while the proposed congestion charge is only 100 yuan per day.
Right now, few car owners fear the threat of getting a parking ticket. A friend told me that he is ticketed about once every 10 times he parks illegally. “Only 200 yuan to park along the road 10 times? That’s quite a bargain,” he said.
Of course, some drivers have managed to rack up quite a number of citations. The Shanghai police, in fact, recently unveiled information about the 20 worst parking offenders. The “winner” was identified as the owner of a Suzhou-registered license plate. Shanghai police said the plate made it into the ticket book no less than 186 times in the year through October 22, a period of 295 days. That equates to one offense every 40 hours.
The total number of parking tickets issued in the city in the period mentioned above rose 16 percent from a year earlier to more than 3 million, or 10,000-plus per day, police said (“Driver picks up 186 parking fines,” Shanghai Daily October24, 2015).
The truth is that only when most cases of illegal parking are punished will the number of cars on the road be significantly reduced.
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