Troubles swirl over plate restrictions

A Nanjing-based auto salesman, surnamed Shu, has been penalized by police for spreading rumors online which said that Nanjing would limit auto license plate numbers to curb private vehicles, the Nanjing police department said on its official Weibo account Tuesday.

It was not the first time Nanjing police have refuted rumors they would limit license plates. Two citizens were earlier detained for making up the rumors, media reports said on April 24.

However, despite the police denial, the public still seem convinced the plates will be limited. The number of people who applied license plates reached 1,600 in Nanjing on April 29, creating a record and doubling the regular application number, according to media reports.

The public suspicions may have been caused by several other cities which have continued to roll out or strengthen vehicle restrictions.

The vehicle limit policies are often regarded as a solution for traffic congestion and air pollution in crowded cities, but they are also causing growing outrage.

Rumors swirl in Nanjing

Since the beginning of 2014, there have been online rumors that Nanjing, capital city of East China's Jiangsu Province, would follow Hangzhou by launching an auto license plate limit policy. The rumor even said that Nanjing would start the license plate lottery on July 1, media reports said.

Nanjing police detained two rumormongers and one of them said that the rumor he put on the Internet came from an advertisement text message sent by auto sellers, a local newspaper Modern Express reported Tuesday.

From April 20 to Friday, 9,933 vehicles were sold in the five days of the Nanjing auto show, creating a new sales record for the exhibition, auto news portal pcauto.com reported Tuesday.

Nanjing citizens were skeptical of the government's clarification because Hangzhou had also refuted "rumors" they would introduce a license plate limit policy but suddenly announced such a policy on March 25, the precise time the "rumors" had said.

The rumors in Hangzhou had been flying since 2013. But faced with questions from the public and media, the Hangzhou traffic administration denied the rumor in February and told the media that the administration "has not started to consider setting a limit."

But in a dramatic reversal, the Hangzhou government held a press conference on March 25 and announced it would limit auto license plates. Citizens now have to apply for new car plates through a plate lottery or bidding.

The Hangzhou government has been widely criticized for flip-flopping, but the government did not apologize.

Lu Xiande, deputy director of Hangzhou Transportation Administration Bureau, said that there was no information leakage and the bureau will not investigate it, news portal chinanews.com reported on April 30.

Liu Kexi, a member of the Jiangsu Provincial People's Congress, said that it is impossible for Nanjing to suddenly announce an auto plate limit policy without notice in advance because it would go against a local auto regulation, which requires a 30-day information publicity period for any such policy, the Modern Express reported on May 4.

Boosting policies

Almost all first-tier cities have adopted auto limit policies except Shenzhen, South China's Guangdong Province.

Shanghai was the first city to set a limit policy on vehicle license plates. It started license plate bidding to control private vehicle numbers from 1994 and the price surged to 74,000 yuan ($11,847) for each private license plate in April.

Beijing started its auto limit policy in 2011 with a license plate lottery, but due to the growing number of applications, the success rate for receiving a private vehicle license plate dropped from 9.43 percent in 2011 to 1 percent in April of 2014.

People who are not lucky enough to win the lottery but do need a car sometimes apply for a permit for non-Beijing vehicles to drive in the Beijing urban area, but each permit only lasts six months.

The permit system was also set up in early 2011 and has became popular due to the license plate limit policy.

Han Tao, a Beijing-based engineer, has not been able to "win" a Beijing auto license plate even though he has been participating in the lottery for three years.

"So I applied for a license plate from Hebei Province and drove in Beijing with the permit for non-Beijing cars," he told the Global Times Tuesday.

"I have to renew it every half year but it is acceptable," he said.

However, this solution is unlikely to remain viable. Beijing this year shortened the permit's validity period from six months to seven days.

"It is incredibly troublesome to renew the permit every week," Han said. He even considered buying a second-hand Beijing license plate from the black market, even though it is illegal.

Government departments say the license plate policy is designed to ease traffic jams, but these policies distort market mechanisms, the Xinhua news agency reported Monday.

The report said that just setting restrictions on vehicle numbers by administrative means is a "lazy" solution.

"Obviously the limit policy infringes on customers' right to purchase products they need, but currently, city administrations have no other means to tackle traffic jams," said Li Weili, deputy chief of the industry research division of the business consulting center under the State Information Center.

However, the limit policy should be a short-term solution rather than a permanent one, he stressed.

When adopting limit policies, local governments should pay more attention to other fundamental solutions, including urban planning and public transportation development, and the public should be told how long they have to bear the limit policy, according to Li.

Large Chinese cities such as Beijing, are too concentrated around the city center, Li said.

Although the concept of satellite towns has long been discussed in China, most people living in rural areas or satellite towns still work in city centers, which indicates huge pressure on daily traffic, he noted.

Spreading out population centers through reasonable city planning and reducing the dependency on private vehicles via better public transportation should be the main solutions to traffic jams, Li concluded.