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The congestion dilemma – Capital caps new vehicle registrations to stem traffic jams

January 4, 2011  Filed under Outlook  

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Cities are built for people, not cars. However, with more people now able to afford cars, major cities like Beijing and Shanghai are becoming nothing but giant parking lots.

The Beijing government announced recently it will limit the issuance of new car license plates to ease the city’s traffic congestion.

Drivers step out of their vehicles to survey traffic along east Third Ring Road in Beijing. Fu Zengkai/CFP Photo

Drivers step out of their vehicles to survey traffic along east Third Ring Road in Beijing. Fu Zengkai/CFP Photo

The Beijing government has announced new traffic measures, including limiting registration of new vehicles, in a major effort to tackle the capital’s traffic jams.

China Daily quoted Zhou Zhengyu, deputy secretary-general of the municipal government, as saying that only 240,000 vehicles would be registered next year in Beijing, a city with a population of 19 million.

Zhou further said that as of last Friday, car registration will be allocated by a license-plate lottery system.

Private car buyers will receive 88 percent of the new plates, or 17,600 plates per month. Two percent will be for commercial use, while the remaining 10 percent will go to companies, government institutions and others, Zhou said.

Among those qualified include permanent residents, military servicemen, foreigners, residents of Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan and those who have no residency status but have paid personal income tax or made social security contributions in the city for at least five consecutive years.

The number of cars in Beijing has grown quickly as urbanization and modernization progresses. This has caused severe congestion in some downtown areas, bringing the average speed of cars to only 20 kilometers per hour.

Beijing’s municipal government said it aims to have public transportation account for 50 percent of commutes in the city by 2015.

(Agencies)

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It’s the summer of highway traffic jam

September 7, 2010  Filed under Ahen  

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HUAIAN COUNTY, CHINA—So you think struggling home from Ontario’s cottage country was tough?
Think again.
And consider, if you will, the case of Chinese trucker Pang Laisuo.
On Sunday his coal-laden transport truck was caught in a traffic jam near here, about 240 kilometres north of Beijing.
Pang knew he’d have something of a wait.
What he didn’t know was that it would last 18 hours.
“Everyone who pulled up at 4 o’clock Sunday afternoon ended up being stuck there until 10 o’clock Monday morning,” says Pang, a lean and grizzled man in his 50s speaking at a roadside stop amid the low roar of slow passing trucks. “No one budged.”
Under normal circumstances, in that elapsed time, Pang says he could have hauled his coal from the city of Hohhot, in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, all the way to the mega city of Tianjin — about 700 kilometres.
But circumstances here are anything but normal.
This is the season of traffic hell in this part of China, a summer that brought what has been described as the world’s biggest traffic jam: a monstrosity of traffic that slowed to a crawl in recent weeks and even extended, at one point, to more than 100 kilometres.
The situation was so bad that even China’s state broadcaster CCTV declared last week that the highway from Hohhot to Beijing had morphed into one huge “parking lot.”
That jam paralyzed more than 10,000 trucks, almost all of them carrying coal.
Truckers along this route say that what used to take a day and a half can now take four, five or even six days of travel.
The cause of the calamity, most say, is a combination of bad planning — a summer of endless construction projects that have narrowed traffic lanes — and China’s ever-growing appetite for coal, most of it now being hauled out of Inner Mongolia.
Coal accounts for 70 per cent of China’s energy supplies.
It may be dirty, but it remains cheap and plentiful here and continues to propel China’s juggernaut economy.
In the Gentleman from Hunan Restaurant, on State Road G110 — now arguably China’s main coal transportation artery — a half-dozen truckers from Inner Mongolia know all about it. Hauling coal is their livelihood, but it’s a livelihood that has become more challenging in recent years, they say.
The longer the delays, the more fuel they burn, the more meals they buy, the less coal they move.
“There’s just too many vehicles out there and not enough road,” says one veteran, reaching for a plate of deep-fried pork as his colleagues nod approval.
The others at the table — they range in age from 25 to 39 — all hail from the Baotou area of Inner Mongolia. Most have known each other since childhood. They’re all independent contractors, owning three durable transport trucks worth more than 1.4 million Chinese yuan (about $220,000). They want improvements.
It’s not as if China has neglected to build new expressways. The country has been on a highway-building boom, quintupling its network in the past decade.
But it has been slow to mesh the nation’s specific needs for Mongolian coal with a network of roads that can handle those needs.
Now, local drivers say, existing roads have taken such a beating that repair crews are everywhere at once — shutting down lanes and slowing traffic.
Wisely, the state is building two additional rail lines for coal and cargo to take pressure off the highway system. But they’re not expected to be in place for some time.
As the men speak, the afternoon air outside is filled with the sound of trucks moving gingerly in low gears.
The back up of trucks on this narrow, two-lane stretch extends to the horizon.
“There are just too many tolls in the system,” says the oldest in the crew who, at 39, has 16 years of experience behind the wheel. “It takes too much time getting through all of them.”
“And then there are the police,” another complains.
Truckers say traffic police take a vigorous approach in handing out fines for various infractions. But getting proper receipts for payment is often difficult, suggesting that the police might well be pocketing the proceeds of some of those tickets.
“If you want an official receipt, you have to pay 200 RMB (about $30),” one explains. “But if you don’t want an official receipt, you can pay 100 RMB or even 50 RMB.”
The truckers say they feel like slow-moving targets.
A driver takes a nap under his truck jammed on an entrance ramp to the Beijing-Tibet Highway in Guoleizhuang township, in north China's Hebei province, on Aug. 23. AP Photo

A driver takes a nap under his truck jammed on an entrance ramp to the Beijing-Tibet Highway in Guoleizhuang township, in north China's Hebei province, on Aug. 23. AP Photo

HUAIAN COUNTY, CHINA—So you think struggling home from Ontario’s cottage country was tough?

Think again.

And consider, if you will, the case of Chinese trucker Pang Laisuo.

On Sunday his coal-laden transport truck was caught in a traffic jam near here, about 240 kilometres north of Beijing.

Pang knew he’d have something of a wait.

What he didn’t know was that it would last 18 hours.

“Everyone who pulled up at 4 o’clock Sunday afternoon ended up being stuck there until 10 o’clock Monday morning,” says Pang, a lean and grizzled man in his 50s speaking at a roadside stop amid the low roar of slow passing trucks. “No one budged.”

Under normal circumstances, in that elapsed time, Pang says he could have hauled his coal from the city of Hohhot, in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, all the way to the mega city of Tianjin — about 700 kilometres.

But circumstances here are anything but normal.

This is the season of traffic hell in this part of China, a summer that brought what has been described as the world’s biggest traffic jam: a monstrosity of traffic that slowed to a crawl in recent weeks and even extended, at one point, to more than 100 kilometres.

The situation was so bad that even China’s state broadcaster CCTV declared last week that the highway from Hohhot to Beijing had morphed into one huge “parking lot.”

That jam paralyzed more than 10,000 trucks, almost all of them carrying coal.

Truckers along this route say that what used to take a day and a half can now take four, five or even six days of travel.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/china/article/857316–it-s-the-summer-of-highway-traffic-jam-hell-in-china?bn=1

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Chinese Traffic Jam Stretches 60 Miles, Ten Days

August 24, 2010  Filed under Blogger, Mandy Han  

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Traffic jams are common in China, but one that began earlier this month has been going on for nine days .

Traffic jams are common in China, but one that began earlier this month has been going on for nine days .

Did you have a bad commute today? How long did you sit in traffic — an hour, maybe two? Thousands of motorists in China have been stuck for ten days in a jam that goes on for more than 60 miles.

Road construction started the jam August 14 in China’s Heibei Province on a major highway headed toward Beijing. The snarl got worse as some vehicles collided and others broke down. Officials say the backup could continue for a month because the road project is expected to last about that long.

The stretch of highway, which is a vital route for produce, coal and other supplies shipped to Beijing. It has become increasingly prone to big jams as the capital (home to more than 20 million people) consumes more and more goods. Growing numbers of heavy trucks hauling the freight cause damage to the roads which in turn need more traffic-slowing maintenance.

China has pushed hard in recent years to expand its road network. In many cases, though, traffic has grown a lot faster that the roads’ ability to carry it. Heavy traffic is common around many Chinese cities but the ten-day jam is outside the norm. The extreme congestion reportedly has developed its own economy as merchants sell food, water and other essentials to stranded drivers at inflated prices.

http://blogs.wsj.com/drivers-seat/2010/08/24/chinese-traffic-jam-stretches-60-miles-ten-days/

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