Tianjin curbs purchase of new vehicles

Tianjin has joined other big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou to curb vehicle purchases as worries about pollution and traffic congestion rise around the country.

The purchase restriction led to a rush buying of vehicles in Tianjin and raised fresh doubts over its effectiveness in addressing traffic and environmental problems at the expense of residents' rights to purchase vehicles.

The city's municipal government imposed quotas on new license plates starting Monday, requiring buyers join the lottery or bid in auctions to win a plate, in an effort to optimize the city's traffic environment, ease traffic congestion, improve air quality and ensure a reasonable growth of vehicle numbers, according to its government website.

"It is a necessary step for big cities like Tianjin to curb traffic congestion before it becomes too excessive," Xu Kangming, a transport expert and founder of consultancy 3E Transportation Systems, told the Global Times on Monday.

As a city that holds 14 million permanent residents, Tianjin had 2.36 million registered motor vehicles by 2012, up from 1.2 million in 2006, while the average driving speed on downtown roads during rush hours dropped to 19.5 kilometers per hour in 2011, according to a Monday report by the Tianjin Daily.

"Increasingly heavy air pollution has also triggered big cities like Beijing and Tianjin to intensify limitations on vehicle purchases," Xu added.

The Tianjin Daily quoted a 2012 report on the city's environment as saying that vehicle emissions contributed 16 percent of PM2.5, a major pollutant, and are held as a key source of air pollution.

"Curbing car purchases can be an immediate solution to ease air pollution and traffic jams, and it will be adopted in big cities suffering these problems," Niu Fengrui, former director of the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times.

Media captured local residents standing in line waiting to buy cars in a used car market on Sunday before the city began imposing quotas on its new car plates.

"It can't fix the problems completely, "Niu said, adding that the causes for air pollution and traffic jams are more complicated than the increasing number of vehicles.

Zhao Ruizheng, a research fellow with the Heilongjiang Provincial Academy of Social Sciences, regards this as a lazy way for the government to deal with problems without researching the underlying cause for traffic jams.

"This will exacerbate social inequality and transfer the roads, which are public resources, to privileged resources enjoyed by high-income earners and government vehicles," Zhao was quoted as saying in a report by news portal xinhuanet.com.

Meanwhile, as some locals have expressed concerns over the city's public transportation system, which is less developed than those in Beijing and Shanghai, experts suggest that Tianjin should develop diversified public transportation to ease traffic.

"It should be equipped with more suitable public transportation services with more convenient transfers and a low fare," Zhu Shouxian, a research fellow at the same institution as Niu, told the Global Times, adding that urban planning and governance in big cities should be emphasized while managing traffic and pollution problems.

In addition to purchase controls, Tianjin will also follow Beijing's lead by adopting a similar traffic restriction scheme starting on March 1, 2014, which bans one fifth of private vehicles from roads on weekdays, Miao Hongwei, head of the city's traffic management bureau, said at a press conference held on Sunday evening.

Moreover, the city will ban vehicles with non-local plates from driving into the city's outer ring road during morning and evening rush hours on weekdays, Miao said.