Vehicle congestion may be an increasing problem in the Olympic city of Beijing, but there will be no efforts to restrain residents from buying new cars.
That was the verdict delivered by the Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform as it outlined its plans to deal with the increasing size of city vehicle numbers. It suggested that parking fees may be raised in urban districts and more efforts will be made to build more trail transit lines. However, despite the fact that the number of registered vehicles in Beijing exceeded four million units in December 2009 – equating to 66.1 cars for every 100 households – there are no plans to curb car buying.
A report by the Ministry of Public Security stated that almost 200million Chinese can drive a vehicle – that’s about 15 per cent of the 1.3billion population. Around 19million Chinese obtained a driving licence in 2009; while a total of 16.7million vehicles were sold in the country last year.
Much of the growth in car buying has been attributed to government stimulus policies which included lower taxes on small displacement cars to replace old vehicles.
