Wheels come off 'no-car' campaign
Officially, it was the mainland's fifth No Car Day yesterday, but the streets remained defiantly clogged with their usual traffic jams.
Despite a record 148 mainland cities participating in the World Car Free Day campaign aimed at easing congestion and reducing exhaust emissions, organisers from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development admitted the one-day event likely achieved little.
Traffic experts and people on the mainland's congested streets blamed half-hearted involvement by local governments and called the result another example of their failure to deliver on conservation goals.
Traffic in major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen seemed little affected by the no-car campaign, which many citizens dismissed as a charade.
Participating cities, including Lhasa and Urumqi , agreed to roll out special measures to promote public transport and to designate special no-car zones, according to Zhang Yu of the ministry's China Academy of Urban Planning and Design.
But a large number of people said they were unaware of the event, and some commuters complained they saw no improvement in the vehicle-clogged streets.
Shanghai, for instance, closed a two-square-kilometre area to private cars. But the area was far outside the city centre and included mostly open ground, construction sites and a riverfront park. The ban lasted only from 9am to 4pm - far shorter than the 12-hour duration in most cities.
'It's completely meaningless,' said Ma Lian , a Shanghai taxi driver. 'I heard this special day started in France and that they do it properly there. In China, all our government understands is how to put on a show. It's just propaganda.'
In the end, the city closed even fewer streets than advertised, with the zone's only main road left open.
Staff at Maxxis garage on Yunjin Road - one of just a handful of businesses inside the affected zone - said they had received no prior warning that the event was going to be held.
Local media, however, reported that passenger numbers on the Shanghai Metro had gone up by 72,000, compared with the previous day, an increase of around 4 per cent.
In Beijing, a scenic area around the Olympic stadium was designated as a no-car zone, but the area is generally free of congestion anyway.
Zhang described the move as an example of the municipal government's lack of interest in the campaign. Unlike many other cities that showed unprecedented interest, she noted that authorities in Beijing did not bother to promote the event.
Zhong Xiaolu, an IT analyst in Beijing, said she did not hear about the event until she saw microblog postings on Sina Weibo. She was late for work by half an hour because of traffic jams on Second Ring Road.
'It is a pity that many people in the capital did not know about the event,' Zhang said, adding that local governments' attitudes have also hampered the scope of the event.
In Hangzhou , a no-car zone was located downtown, while authorities in Guangzhou promised to pull nearly 90 per cent of government cars off the roads yesterday.
Zhang noted there are few special lanes for bicycles left on Beijing's roads, which has made cycling difficult and dangerous.
'It's naive to expect concrete results from a day-long event,' she said. 'But it's a good opportunity to not only promote environmental awareness among the public, but also to exert pressure on development-minded local authorities to rethink their urban-planning policies.'
Additional reporting by Laura Zhou
200m
vehicles will be on the mainland's roads by 2020, up from 76 million in 2009, according to a government estimate
