Migrant drivers to be pushed out of Beijing, Shanghai
Two cities have drafted what are considered as China's strictest regulations on online car-booking services, which some netizens criticized for discriminating against migrant people as they only allow registered residents to provide such services.
However, experts said the regulations are meant to manage the population and ease traffic.
Beijing and Shanghai on Saturday issued separate draft regulations on car-booking services, stating that only residents with local household registration, or hukou, and local driving licenses are qualified to provide the service, news portal ce.cn reported.
Moreover, their vehicles have to be registered with local traffic management departments, said the report.
Some netizens strongly oppose the draft regulations, claiming they discriminate against migrant people and do nothing to solve the uneven distribution of resources.
Yu Mingyuan, a research fellow at the Ministry of Transport, told the Global Times on Sunday that many non-registered drivers will be driven out of the business if the regulation is implemented.
"They should be allowed to enter the industry as long as local public security departments could identify them," said Yu.
However, Wei Zhensheng, deputy secretary general of the Beijing Lawyers Association's Commission of Transport, told the Global Times that the regulation is reasonable and legal, since the transport ministry had empowered local governments to make regulations based on local conditions.
Wei said many vehicles in the business are private cars not authorized by local authorities to provide the service. "The regulation aims to better manage the industry," said Wei.
"The drafts take into consideration the metropolis' population, economic development level, traffic conditions and air quality," an official from the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau (BTMB) was quoted as saying by the Beijing Daily on Sunday.
According to BTMB data, the city's traffic congestion index has risen sharply since August 2014, when domestic taxi-hailing app Didi Kuaiche rapidly developed in Beijing, and the index rose by 31.5 percent in June 2015 compared to the same period the previous year, China Central Television (CCTV) reported Sunday.
CCTV also reported that many vehicles providing car-booking services use out-of-town car licenses, with about 1.15 million such vehicles entering Beijing monthly from April to August, 150,000 more compared to the same period the previous year.
"Beijing traffic is super saturated and any increase in the number of out-of-town vehicles could make a great impact," Chen Yanyan, a deputy dean of the Metropolitan Transportation College of the Beijing University of Technology, told the Global Times, adding that Beijing aims to build a public transport-oriented traffic system, and expanding car-booking services would add pressure on city traffic.
