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Reduce number of govt cars

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-05 07:31

The government should drastically slash the number of its cars to help reduce spending and survive the chilly economic winter, says an article in Yangtze Evening News. An excerpt follows:

It is reported that the authorities of New York City plan to slash its non-emergency government cars by 10 percent by the end of March to cut down expenditures. The city possesses 6,800 such vehicles, of which 1,200 are owned by its policy departments and 750 owned by environment authorities.

Compared with Beijing's, the number of government vehicles in New York City is very small. The Chinese capital now owns a total number of 600,000 government vehicles. As a highly developed international mega city, New York's example indicates that there are no reasons for our less developed cities to feed such a large number of government vehicles. This simply is beyond our economic capacity.

Beijing imposed limits on the use of government cars during the Beijing Olympics, obviously improving traffic conditions. The measure, however, did not affect too much the normal functioning of government departments. Why can't our city authorities take the same action as New York in reducing the use of government vehicles?

(China Daily 01/05/2009 page4)