Beijing raises parking prices, accidently raises no illegal parkers at the same time

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The Beijing Municipal Government loved for its citizens to buy cars in the past few years, the automotive industry keeps thousands of Beijing’ers in jobs in smokey factories on the city outskirts, but by late 2010 it was obvious that City Hall couldn’t keep up with the number of new cars that were hitting the roads, so they introduced a few anti car policies.

The first anti-car policies were actually introduced prior to the Olympics in 2008, where cars with an odd or even number could not be on the road on a particular day (i.e. the last no on a plate is 1, so you cannot be on the roads on Friday), this was to calm traffic but also reduce the amount of air pollution ahead of the worlds biggest sports event. At the end of 2010 the government announced it was ‘going to do something’ about the number of cars on Beijing roads which started a panic buying of automobiles from pretty much every brand, disaster struck on the final days of December when the government announced that it was limiting car license plates to just 20,000 per month or 240,000 plates per year – In 2010 Beijing’ers bought just under 900,000 new cars.

In 2011 City Hall increased the cost of car parking to upto 10rmb per hour in some places, but one of the major knock on effects is that people are avoiding paying for official car parking spaces and are parking where ever they please. Which is both a dream and a nightmare for the cities account books, the local traffic police are now dealing with a substantially increased number of parking violations which maybe a minor boom time for revenue but the sheer number of violators is leaving the traffic police short of staff.

Interestingly, the guidelines for renting car parking spots in residential areas have been lowered to just 150rmb per month, but Beijing residents have found a way to beat this system as well: They leave their cars in their spots for months at a time without moving them, thus nobody is quite sure to collect the monthly parking fees from.