The thin white line: van driver eludes Chinese traffic cops by chalking his own parking places

Find a parking spot can be a pain in any city, but a driver in eastern China has come up with a novel idea to get around the problem - he paints a new one himself, a mainland newspaper reports.

Police found the man in Jinhua, Zhejiang province drawing lines with chalk for parking space on Monday afternoon, the Qianjiang Evening News reported.

Local traffic cops had noticed the strange markings while on patrol. Compared with legitimate lines, the chalked ones were too thin and incomplete, the report said.

Surveillance video later obtained by police shows a goods van parked on the side of the road on Monday afternoon. Later a man wearing an orange shirt gets out of the van and appears to be drawing something on the road.

The van had stopped at the false parking lot over four days, the report said.