Focus
Driving expensive? It can be worse
By Bai Ping (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-14 08:26
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People check out cars at the Beijing Spring Auto Show on April 3. There are now more than 4.17 million vehicles in Beijing and 2,000 new cars hit the roads each day. [Da Wei / For China Daily] |
Those of us who own cars in Beijing know the strain a set of wheels can put on the wallet.
I drive a 2-liter American car between my home and office four days a week, leaving it a home one day a week due to a citywide car ban policy that keeps some cars off the road every working day. I also use it for grocery shopping on weekends.
I log 15,000 km behind the wheel a year. It's safe to assume that I get about 10 km to the liter for city driving, so petrol costs me at least 10,600 yuan a year since my car uses 97-octane fuel that, these days, is priced at 7.09 yuan a liter.
I bought the car for more than 200,000 yuan including the purchase tax and other one-time expenses. If the car lasts 15 years, that cost averages out to about 13,000 yuan per year. Insurance, parking fees and fines from traffic tickets cost me about 10,000 yuan per year.
Of course, I could also have put the money in a bank, rather than buying a car, earning an annual interest of 4,000 yuan.
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But I would have to spend an extra two hours commuting if I took buses and the subway. And in our increasingly materialistic society, a car is a status symbol. It can be embarrassing to be seen on a bus stranded in a traffic jam or walking through clouds of dust from a bus stop to the office.
A senior local advertising executive once told me his clients only target subway commuters below the age of 40, because they doubt any successful older Chinese people take the subway.
Hiring a taxi is also cheaper than driving a car. But they can be hard to get on some mornings or during a family emergency, such as taking my young son to the hospital at midnight.
The best thing about having a car is the freedom it provides, since you can go anywhere at any time.
There also seems to be little social pressure to give up driving or to drive less.
The city used to advocate green modes of transportation and tried to educate residents about environmental and traffic concerns. But in a bid to boost local gross domestic product, officials now say there is actually room for more cars in the city and are actively encouraging the public craze for private wheels. There are now more than 4.17 million vehicles in Beijing and 2,000 new cars hit the capital's roads each day.
We car owners have already experienced driving restrictions, traffic congestion, soaring fuel prices and parking rates, what's going to happen next? Will the road network be paralyzed one day? Will the city introduce a congestion tax or a license plate bidding system like the one in Shanghai soon?
You can rest assured that driving will be increasingly expensive here.
