Beijing caps new cars, issues traffic measures

Thu, 23 Dec 2010

Beijing - China's capital on Thursday announced an annual cap on licenses for new cars and other measures designed to relieve the city's notorious traffic congestion.

Authorities are to license 240,000 new cars annually from 2011, one-third of the 700,000 new cars that hit Beijing's roads this year.

From January 1, buyers of new cars will have to apply for license plates issued via a lottery before taking to the road, the municipal government said.

Beijing officials have struggled to control the city's mushrooming traffic over the past decade with expansion of public transport and restrictions on private car usage showing only limited success in clearing the gridlock.

Other measures announced Thursday included a rush-hour ban on vehicles registered outside Beijing and city-center parking restrictions.

The estimated number of vehicles licensed in Beijing has reached about 5 million.

Anticipation of the new measures fueled a fresh wave of buying this month with 30,000 cars sold in the past week alone, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Car exhaust fumes and other pollutants were a major concern for athletes in the run-up to the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008.

Chinese authorities only allowed cars to drive every other day on Beijing's roads during the Olympics and have since imposed permanent driving restrictions that they claimed have reduced Beijing's traffic by about 20 per cent on weekdays.

Every car is now barred from the roads one day a week, a system that is enforced through license plate numbers, but little relief is seen on the streets of the city of 17 million people.

Source: Earth Times.
Link: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/news/359437,cars-issues-traffic-measures.html.