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Car nightmare

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-12-09 08:01

Chinese consumers' insatiable demand for new cars no doubt delights the auto industry.

However, local officials, who are responsible for making their cities better places to live, must be far-sighted enough to see the imminent dangers arising from the excessive expansion in automobile ownership.

Otherwise, many people's dream of owning a car will soon turn out to be a traffic and environmental nightmare that no city can afford.

This is a particularly pressing issue for Beijing, as the accelerating rise in automobile ownership is pushing the Chinese capital ever closer to the verge of disastrous congestion.

Even when the number of cars on the roads was only growing by about 1,000 units a day years ago, Beijing was already finding it increasingly difficult to deal with the mounting traffic pressures.

Now that automobile ownership in the city has reached 4.67 million, as of late November, and is expanding by more than 3,000 units a day, the city has been forced to acknowledge that the boom in vehicle ownership is no longer just an innocuous boon for the auto industry.

Without immediate and efficient measures to ease congestion, it is more than likely that the Chinese capital will become increasingly gridlocked. Not to mention the environmental and economic losses that will far outweigh the profit that the auto industry makes.

It seems local policymakers have now summoned the urgency to take action to ease the traffic pressure. It was reported that the central government recently approved, in principle, Beijing's plan to fix its worsening traffic problems in the next five years.

Unfortunately, due to lack of details about what the municipal government will actually do, speculation that it may curb car purchases through license plate control have given rise to a surge in car sales.

About 96,000 cars were sold last month in Beijing, up 33 percent year-on-year. And the figure is expected to hit 100,000 this month as local residents rush to take advantage of current tax incentives before they are scrapped.

The best hope now is that when the municipal government's new measures to ease congestion are rolled out next year, they will be efficient enough to calm the car-purchasing mania in the city. It will be a nightmare for everyone if those new measures are not smart enough to persuade considerably more people to drive much less in downtown areas where traffic pressure is extremely high.

Some form of control over the total automobile ownership will help in the long run. But a smart and effective limit over downtown driving is more urgently required to ease congestion.

Whether Beijing can successfully deal with its traffic problems will be of interest to other major Chinese cities, which will face the same problems sooner or later.

It will also be a test for Chinese policymakers as they vow to transform the country into a consumer society.