CARS IN BEIJING

BEIJING: WORLD’S BIGGEST PARKING LOT

China RealTime Report, August 24, 2010

China’s love affair with cars seems increasingly to be turning its capital into a giant, nightmarish, gridlocked parking lot. (See a slideshow.)

Following news of a 10-day traffic jam outside Beijing that has stretched up to 100 kilometers (62 miles) long, state media on Tuesday reported that average driving speeds in the capital could drop below 15 kilometers an hour if residents keep on buying at current rates of 2,000 new cars a day. At that pace, Beijing will have 7 million vehicles by 2015, according to the head of the Beijing Transportation Research Center, and the pace of movement will slow to what it was a decade or more ago when China was still the Bicycle Kingdom.

The problem is that Beijing’s roads only have enough capacity to handle 6.7 million vehicles — and that’s assuming current restrictions stay in place, such as the one requiring private cars to keep off the road for one day a week.

The results of too many tires on too little road are a daily commuter crush that’s among the worst in the world, comparable to New Delhi or Moscow and five times worse than America’s capital of road rage, Los Angeles, according to a recent IBM study.

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