The city of Beijing, ranked as having the world’s worst traffic, has proposed offering public bicycles, building tunnels and possibly imposing fees for driving in parts of the Chinese capital to ease congested roads.
Other proposals that Beijing’s municipal government posted online for reducing traffic include limits on the number of government cars in the city and construction of additional subway lines. The proposals were posted on Monday on the city transportation department’s Web site so that local residents could submit comments.
Tax cuts and subsidies offered by the government to spur automobile sales have fueled a surge in both the number of drivers and traffic on roads, as China passed the US last year to become the world’s biggest car market. Authorities are looking to allay concern among residents after an International Business Machine report ranked traffic in Beijing as being tied with Mexico City as the world’s worst.
“The measures will raise the cost of using a car instead of the cost of buying one,” said Jenny Gu, a Shanghai-based analyst at auto industry researcher J.D. Power & Associates. “People who really want a car will not give it up.”
Sales of passenger cars to dealers last month increased 29.3 percent from a year earlier to a monthly record of 1.34 million units, the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers said last week. Stimulus measures helped China’s industry wide vehicle sales jump 46 percent last year to 13.6 million units.
In Beijing, more than 20,000 vehicles were sold in the first week of this month, more than double the 9,000 vehicles sold during the same period of last year, Xinhua news agency reported. The Chinese capital had more than 4.7 million registered cars and more than 6.2 million licensed drivers as of Dec. 5, according to the city government.
A global poll of 8,192 motorists conducted by IBM in April and May ranked Beijing as the most “onerous” commute in the world, when factors such as traffic predictability, gasoline prices and emotional stress were included. Beijing was also tied with Moscow as being the city with the most road trips canceled because of anticipated traffic jams.
To alleviate the congestion, Beijing’s municipal government already bars cars from the city roads on specific days each month depending on the last digit of the license. The city is also aiming to have public transportation account for 50 percent of commutes in the city by 2015 and may offer 50,000 public bicycles to commuters at 1,000 stations around the city, according to the proposals posted.
Shanghai, China’s wealthiest city, has since 1986 controlled the number of vehicles on its roads by restricting car licenses. The city sells a limited number of licenses each month at auction. Shanghai auctioned 8,500 car licenses on Nov. 20 at an average price of 45,291 yuan (US$6,807) each, according to government data.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion