Beijing hints at harsher curbs on private cars to ease air pollution
Beijing officials appear to be building a case for a long-term policy on restricting the use of private cars to alleviate the city’s notorious air pollution.
Beijing officials appear to be building a case for a long-term policy on restricting the use of private cars to alleviate the city’s notorious air pollution.
Environmental officials have said their analysis of air pollution levels during the week of the Apec summit in November showed that limiting the number of vehicles on the road was the most effective way to improve air quality.
The analysis, released yesterday by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau, said the capital city was able to reduce main air pollutants by almost half during the Apec summit in mid November, which resulted in a relatively low average PM2.5 reading of 43.
Of the total reductions, said the report, vehicle restrictions accounted for some 39.5 per cent, followed by the suspension of construction work and factory production, which contributed 19.9 per cent and 17.5 per cent respectively.
Song Qiang, head of Beijing Municipal Research Institute of Environmental Protection, said sensitivity analysis was applied to determine the effectiveness of each measure, The Beijing News reported.
The analysis concluded that vehicle restriction is the most effective method for reducing PM2.5 levels and suggested that one direction the environment bureau could work on is to limit the use of vehicles.
The conclusion hints at the possibility of harsher policies that could profoundly affect the city’s nearly four million private car owners and the findings have provoked an apparent backlash online.
Internet users argue that factory emissions in Beijing’s suburbs and neighbouring cities are the major source of pollution, and voiced concerns that the report was pointing to a long-term alternating odd-even scheme, where cars are prohibited from travel on particular days based on whether the last digits on their number plates are odd or even.
The scheme was imposed ahead of the Apec summit in November to ease traffic congestion and reduce air pollution, after previous success of a similar scheme during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
After the Olympics, Beijing eased the odd-even scheme to a less stringent yet still highly controversial rule that bars one-fifth of its private vehicles from the roads on weekdays, according to the last number on their licence plates, and the rule has been in force ever since. Under this rule, private car owners are prohibited from driving inside the city's fifth-ring road for one day every week, of they would face fines.
But that was not the end of their woes. In 2011, Beijing rolled out a monthly lottery system for car buyers in a bid to counter the city’s increasing traffic congestion, but the chances of winning a place on the quota have become very low as demand soured.
The Beijing transportation commission said that only 114, 400 quotas would be allocated to car buyers this year. However, the most recent data showed that there were 2,137,376 valid applicants alone in October, of whom about 0.9 per cent of recipients would be granted a quota.