Home » Opinion » Chinese Views
Tackling car mania by raising cost of driving
By Mei Xinyu |
March 7, 2012, Wednesday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
CHINAIS becoming a nation on wheels. First-tier cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are leading the nation in car numbers.
In Beijing, for instance, the number of vehicles surpassed a record 5 million in January, and it now takes ever-shorter time for the city to have another million.
It should be noted, however, that Beijing's cars increased exponentially despite restrictions on private car ownership. They numbered 4 million by 2009. It took only 25 months for that figure to leap to 5 million.
The year of 2009 alone saw 515,000 more cars pouring onto Beijing's roads, almost the same as the total number of cars in Hong Kong.
The explosive growth of vehicles in big Chinese cities has engendered a host of intractable problems, first and foremost the shortage of roads and parking spaces.
According to some calculations, for every million cars added, Beijing will have to add to its road network the equivalent of all the expressways within its Second Ring Road, or 30 percent of the highways within the outer-lying Fifth Ring Road.
Since car use is intense in Beijing, transport authorities estimate that vehicles in the city have an annual mileage more than twice as much as in Tokyo. And 80 percent of its car traffic is confined to within the Sixth Ring Road, contributing to the burden on road network.
The economic and social prices people pay for congestions are pushing their endurance to the limit. If no powerful measures are adopted to regulate, and indeed, discourage car use, by 2025 Beijing will have 7 million cars on its roads, moving at an average speed of 15 kilometers per hour, or about as fast as a ?marathon runner? (true?).
Moreover, Beijing has 1.47 million metered parking spaces and another million free parking spots. If we apply to Beijing the widely accepted car-to-parking space ratio, at 1:1.3, in developed countries, Beijing lacks 3 million of them. Think about what this huge gap portends for a city where land is literally as precious as gold.
In densely populated metropolises, the best way to ease congestion and prevent photochemical smog caused by car exhausts is to build a sustainable and optimum urban transport system that favors public transport over private cars.
Economic leverage
To rein in proliferation of cars, and also to reduce car use and resultant air pollution in downtown areas, we need economic leverage to increase the costs of driving, such as raising parking fees and levying downtown congestion tax.
Considering that rigid curbs on car purchase will dent car sales, making driving more expensive, might prove a better policy.
Opposition to the higher costs of driving, voiced by people who crave the same right to car ownership despite their low disposable income, threatens to undermine Chinese cities' efforts to improve traffic.
We cannot allow an irrational car mania to grip the society. Raising the costs of driving, preferably borne by the wealthy, will generate fiscal revenues to fund face-lifts for urban facilities.
By raising the bar on private car use in first- and second-tier cities, car ownership will more and more be the privilege of the rich. Meanwhile, cheap brands and models will fall out of favor.
For low-end car manufacturers, shrinking demand from affluent customers forces them either to tap the market in smaller cities and rural areas or look overseas for business, in particular in emerging countries.
These nations are sparsely populated compared to China and impose no curbs on car ownership.
Over the past 10 years their economies have been growing at a rate several times that of sluggish Western nations, creating a lot of potential car buyers.
Will our indigenous Chinese car makers seize the opportunity?
The author is a researcher with the Ministry of Commerce. Shanghai Daily reporter Ni Tao translated his article from the Chinese.
In Beijing, for instance, the number of vehicles surpassed a record 5 million in January, and it now takes ever-shorter time for the city to have another million.
It should be noted, however, that Beijing's cars increased exponentially despite restrictions on private car ownership. They numbered 4 million by 2009. It took only 25 months for that figure to leap to 5 million.
The year of 2009 alone saw 515,000 more cars pouring onto Beijing's roads, almost the same as the total number of cars in Hong Kong.
The explosive growth of vehicles in big Chinese cities has engendered a host of intractable problems, first and foremost the shortage of roads and parking spaces.
According to some calculations, for every million cars added, Beijing will have to add to its road network the equivalent of all the expressways within its Second Ring Road, or 30 percent of the highways within the outer-lying Fifth Ring Road.
Since car use is intense in Beijing, transport authorities estimate that vehicles in the city have an annual mileage more than twice as much as in Tokyo. And 80 percent of its car traffic is confined to within the Sixth Ring Road, contributing to the burden on road network.
The economic and social prices people pay for congestions are pushing their endurance to the limit. If no powerful measures are adopted to regulate, and indeed, discourage car use, by 2025 Beijing will have 7 million cars on its roads, moving at an average speed of 15 kilometers per hour, or about as fast as a ?marathon runner? (true?).
Moreover, Beijing has 1.47 million metered parking spaces and another million free parking spots. If we apply to Beijing the widely accepted car-to-parking space ratio, at 1:1.3, in developed countries, Beijing lacks 3 million of them. Think about what this huge gap portends for a city where land is literally as precious as gold.
In densely populated metropolises, the best way to ease congestion and prevent photochemical smog caused by car exhausts is to build a sustainable and optimum urban transport system that favors public transport over private cars.
Economic leverage
To rein in proliferation of cars, and also to reduce car use and resultant air pollution in downtown areas, we need economic leverage to increase the costs of driving, such as raising parking fees and levying downtown congestion tax.
Considering that rigid curbs on car purchase will dent car sales, making driving more expensive, might prove a better policy.
Opposition to the higher costs of driving, voiced by people who crave the same right to car ownership despite their low disposable income, threatens to undermine Chinese cities' efforts to improve traffic.
We cannot allow an irrational car mania to grip the society. Raising the costs of driving, preferably borne by the wealthy, will generate fiscal revenues to fund face-lifts for urban facilities.
By raising the bar on private car use in first- and second-tier cities, car ownership will more and more be the privilege of the rich. Meanwhile, cheap brands and models will fall out of favor.
For low-end car manufacturers, shrinking demand from affluent customers forces them either to tap the market in smaller cities and rural areas or look overseas for business, in particular in emerging countries.
These nations are sparsely populated compared to China and impose no curbs on car ownership.
Over the past 10 years their economies have been growing at a rate several times that of sluggish Western nations, creating a lot of potential car buyers.
Will our indigenous Chinese car makers seize the opportunity?
The author is a researcher with the Ministry of Commerce. Shanghai Daily reporter Ni Tao translated his article from the Chinese.
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