FINGDING A WAY OUT CITIES CARRY OUT DISTINCT STRATEGIES IN BATTING WITH THE EXACERBATING TRAFFIC JAM

By LI LI

FINGDING A WAY OUT CITIES CARRY OUT DISTINCT STRATEGIES IN BATTING WITH THE EXACERBATING TRAFFIC JAM

By LI LI

A lottery was broadcast live both on TV and over the Internet in Beijing on January 26. The “talk-ofthe-town” lottery attracted at least 187,000 pairs of attentive eyes of people who were not yearning for money, but a privilege to own a car in a city notorious for its bad traffc.

A total of 17,600 car license plates were allocated to the lucky applicants participating in Beijing’s first car-plate lottery. The first batch of car license plates for institutional applicants was also allocated through the lottery in February.

Starting January 1, all car buyers in Beijing have to apply frst and then draw lots at monthly lotteries before they can obtain a car license plate. The new mechanism was launched to reduce the growth of new car ownership by allowing only 240,000 in 2011, or about one third of new cars registered in 2010.

In what Chinese Internet users described as “the toughest congestion-tackling measures in history,” authorities in Beijing announced on December 23, 2010, they would slash new car registrations to ease traffc gridlock.

Extensive limits

Data from the Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport (BMCT) show there were only 78,000 cars in Beijing in 1978 and 200,000 in 1985. However, the number of cars soared after the country entered the 21st century amid fast economic growth and urbanization.

Within 13 years, the number of cars in Beijing more than quadrupled to 4.8 million in 2010 from 1 million in 1997, according to the BMCT.

In the U.S. journalForeign Policy’s ranking of cities with the worst traffic, released in August 2010, Beijing stood atop of the list of places where “soul-crushing gridlock is a way of life.”

Beijing’s government agencies and public institutions are prohibited from increasing the size of their vehicle fleets for the next fve years, says the new traffc improvement program.

Other measures include higher parking fees in the city’s downtown areas and stricter traffc rules for cars from other provinces.

In addition to the current restriction that bans Beijing car owners from driving one day each week based on the last digit of their license plates, an odd-even license plate number system could be introduced to allow cars to be driven every other day in peak hours in some congested areas “when necessary.”Traffc authorities also have got the approval to levy a traffc congestion charge in heavy traffc areas.

The program also says the development of new large residential areas and satellite cities will take into consideration Beijing’s industrial development programs, in hopes of enabling residents to work closer to home. It also encourages public service institutions and businesses to adopt staggered working hours to alleviate traffc jams.

As part of Beijing’s efforts to improve its public transit system, the city opened fve new suburban subway lines on December 30, 2010, with a combined length of 108 km, bringing the city’s total number of subway lines to 14 and the total length to 336 km.

The strict traffc rules, backed up by the newly opened subway lines, have already proved effective in easing traffc congestion in Beijing, according to offcials.

“On average, the duration of traffc jams has been reduced by more than two hours per day, from 3 hours and 55 minutes at the end of 2010 to the current 1 hour and 45 minutes,”said BMCT Deputy Director Li Xiaosong on January 12.

Li’s commission has unveiled an index system of Beijing’s traffc congestion, the frst for the city. According to the system, the 0-2 range signifies “smooth” traffic; 2-4, fairly smooth; 4-6, slightly congested, 6-8, moderately congested, and 8-10, heavily congested.

“For a long time before 2010, Beijing’s congestion index had stood above 8.2, but it has remained at 6 since January 1,” Li said.

However, the city government warns a string of new traffic measures are not enough to eliminate Beijing’s gridlock once and for all.

Speaking at the annual session of the city’s legislature on January 16, Beijing Mayor Guo Jinlong said soaring housing prices and traffc congestion were the major pests that harass Beijing’s social and economic development.

He said easing congestion remained a pressing job in a city with 20 million people and 4.8 million vehicles, but vowed to effectively curb the problem in fve years.

A challenge to all

While congestion used to be only reported in big cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in south China’s GuangdongProvince, smaller cities, such as Chengdu in southwestern Sichuan Province, Xi’an in northwestern Shaanxi Province and Nanjing in eastern Jiangsu Province, are also starting to feel the pain of chronic traffc jams.

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CHEN MENGXING

Beijing’s car-plate lottery is said to be a mutation of a similar measure in Shanghai, which introduced auctions of car plates for private use to limit car registrations in 1994. At the latest monthly auction, taking place on January 15, a license plate cost an average of 38,711 yuan ($5,865).

Since the inception of this auction scheme, residents in Shanghai have been complaining about the huge costs of owning a car and even questioned the legitimacy of the scheme. To avoid paying such a surcharge, some residents chose to register their cars in Shanghai’s neighboring provinces.

According to a report on Beijing-basedLegal Weekly, although some government offcials in Shanghai also admitted the car plate auction is not a fundamental solution to traffc jams in the largest business hub of China, they said it did curb the growth of car sales. At the end of September 2010, Shanghai registered a total of 1.67 million cars, less than 40 percent of the fgure in Beijing, which has a smaller population.

Although Shanghai’s frst subway line went into service in 1995, much later than 1971 in Beijing, the city’s rail network has developed much faster. Shanghai now has the world’s second longest metro system with a total length of 424 km. Its subway lines have already joined with the rail network in neighboring Jiangsu Province. According to its new rail system construction plan unveiled in October 2010, Shanghai will have more than 600 km of subway lines in operation by 2015.

At a symposium marking the 25th founding anniversary of the Shanghai City Comprehensive Transportation Planning Institute on December 23, 2010, an expert from the institute toldLegal Weeklyhe believed Shanghai would not copy Beijing’s practice of pulling cars off streets according to their license plate numbers.

The expert suggests Shanghai continue to prioritize the development of public transportation, further improve the city’s infrastructure, establish an Internet-based traffc information release system and accelerate the transfer of functions of inner city areas to new areas.

In an effort to alleviate congestion, Guangzhou, capital city of south China’s Guangdong Province, was considering collecting higher road-use fees from motorists, said the city’s traffc authorities.

Guangzhou had almost 2.15 million registered vehicles at the end of 2010, an increase of more than 300,000 from a year earlier. Every 1,000 local residents has more than 90 cars.

The number of private cars in Guangzhou has grown at an annual rate of 22.1 percent over the past fve years. The fgure is 20.9 percent in Beijing and 21.5 percent in Shanghai.

The Guangzhou Municipal Government has published 30 congestion-tackling measures for public debate between January 23 and March 5. The measures involve collecting congestion fees similar to those imposed in Singapore and London, raising parking fees and encouraging the use of the public transit system.

In the next five years, Guangzhou will begin construction of 11 new rail routes and

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put 3,000 additional buses into downtown services, in hopes of boosting the ratio of public transit users to 70 percent from 59.6 percent last year.

Encouragingly, Guangzhou won the 2011 Sustainable Transport Award granted by New York City-based Institute for Transportation & Development Policy on January 24, for its new bus rapid transit system that is praised for featuring great integration with bike lanes, bike sharing facilities and subways.

Guangzhou also plans to further reform the use of offcial cars, which have long been blamed for contributing to traffc jams. (see page 22)

However, Guangdong will not copy Beijing’s practice of limiting vehicle registrations, because allowing more residents to own private cars was part of the provincial government’s campaign to build a “happy Guangdong,” said Guangdong Governor Huang Huahua.

Fundamental solutions

Many traffic management experts believe current measures could only alleviate jams in various cities while the fundamental solution lies in the optimization of the urban planning.

Chen Yanyan, a professor at the Transportation Research Center of Beijing University of Technology, toldLegal Weeklythe essential cause of traffic jams in most Chinese cities is the supply-demand imbalance in traffc facilities. She quotes a theory of U.S. urbanist Anthony Downs, widely known as the Downs’ Law, to explain the cause of congestion: Travel demand on major roads rises to meet capacity.

According to the rule, if new lanes are added, congestion problems might be lessened in the short term, but the promise of reduced congestion will attract drivers who previously used other routes, traveled at different times of the day, drove less or used other forms of transportation, which boils down to the fact that capacity will rarely relieve congestion in the long run.

Chen said Beijing’s failure just proved Downs’ Law correct. Though Beijing has invested hugely in building roads over the last few years, the expanded road network failed to address the worsening traffc jams.

Chen’s center started to cooperate with the BMCT to study Beijing’s traffc demand as early as 2005. She believes the solution to the city’s traffc problems lies in the control of its demand.

“Reducing residents’ traffic demand cannot be solved through increasing parking fees or levying congestion fees, but requires a reform in overall urban planning,” Chen said. “Beijing’s traffic problems, especially the tidal foods of daily commuters, are mainly caused by urban sprawl. Urban planning also falls into the scope of the broader traffic demand management. Moreover, policies, regulations and the optimization of the road network and public transit system must be used together to manage traffc demand.”

Zhao Jie, a scholar from the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, said it was still not too late for Beijing to pay attention to its urban planning.

“Beijing is bound to grow bigger as it is at the middle period of its urbanization and Beijing’s population will keep increasing for the next two decades,” Zhao said.

Beijing has activated plans to develop three of its suburban areas into satellite cities, including Tongzhou in the east, Shunyi in the north and Yizhuang in the south. All three areas have been linked to downtown areas by subways.

Bottlenecks

Zhao said a great barrier to the implementation of Beijing’s new congestion-tackling measures would be whether different government departments would give their full cooperation.

“The measures include a wide range of policies from urban planning to public transport upgrades, which, I am afraid, will exceed the jurisdiction of the BMCT and requires a cross-department coordination mechanism to ensure its implementation,” Zhao said.

Many people have attributed the failure of previous traffic improvement efforts in Chinese cities to the ill enforcement caused by the lack of cooperation between different government departments.

For example, one day after the BMCT publicized its draft plan to curb traffc jams for public feedback, the government of the Beijing’s downtown Xicheng District unveiled a plan to expand the Financial Street, a bustling city-center business zone, to areas between the South Second Ring Road and South Third Ring Road. Such a blueprint is clearly contradictory to the BMCT’s plan, which says Beijing will “strictly limit new construction in its inner city areas.”

A report in the January issue ofCaijingmagazine said the lack of coordination between different government departments in tackling traffc problems was also refected by their refusal to share data with each other.

The report said all government departments whose work is traffic-related considered their data to be secret. Allegedly, none of the research organizations with projects on Beijing’s traffic have access to the comprehensive traffc data.

Chen said when Beijing built its Subway Line 13, a comfortable walking distance of transit between the new line and existing Line 2 could have been achieved if Beijing’s traffc authorities had reached an agreement with the railway authorities on using a land owned by the latter. But negotiations between the two departments under different supervising authorities failed eventually, which resulted in an inconveniently long walk for passengers in transit that takes at least 15 minutes.

Professor Shi Qixin, former Director of the Institute of Transportation Engineering of Tsinghua University, suggests traffc authorities adopt more technological innovations, such as smart traffc management system, to reduce jams, which also requires cooperation of different departments.