- Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
- Cars on an eight-lane expressway on a polluted day in Beijing.
Faced with often catastrophic air pollution, Beijing is considering taking a page out of London’s playbook: a congestion fee for car owners.
A notice published on the Beijing government website (in Chinese) late Monday said the city is mulling a policy to impose a congestion fee for cars as it aims to keep less than 6 million vehicles licensed by the end of 2017, from about 5.35 million now.
“Whoever pollutes the air is responsible to clean it up,” the state-run China Daily on Tuesday quoted Fang Li, spokesman for the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, as saying. The notice didn’t specify how the fees would be imposed or paid.
Auto emissions account for one-third of PM2.5—particulate matter measuring less than 2.5 micrometers in diameter—in most congested areas in Beijing.
According to the notice, the congestion fee is part of the city’s broader five-year plan to clean up its heavily polluted air and which also targets power plants, oil refiners, cement makers and restaurants. The municipal government of Beijing pledges to reduce the density of PM2.5 by at least 25% by 2017.
Beijing has already distributed license plates through lotteries to curb car sales. It has also restricted the use of motor vehicles by banning private cars one workday a week based on the last digit of the license plate.
Calls for the government to improve air quality surged this past winter, when swaths of the country were blanketed by rarely seen air-pollution levels. In the capital city, residents stocked up on face masks and air purifiers.
But finding a solution to the city’s serious pollution problems won’t be easy.
“Road pricing is controversial. Getting political consensus for that is harder than implementing ownership controls,” Binyam Reja, the World Bank’s transport sector coordinator for China, said in a recent interview. Nonetheless, London and Singapore have successfully introduced such programs, he said.
An official from the environmental ministry was quoted last month by the state-run Xinhua news agency as saying the central government would invest 1.7 trillion yuan ($280 billion) in the coming years in efforts to control air pollution.
In addition to worsening air pollution, Beijing is also combating heavy traffic. The average speed of car traffic in the city is short of 15 kilometers, or 9.3 miles, per hour, about the speed of easy bicycling, data from UBS Securities show.
The notice said Beijing will ban vehicles of outside the city from entering the Sixth Ring Road unless they get permission from the city government. The restriction will take effect in 2014. Currently, cars from other provinces are prohibited from entering the Fifth Ring Road during rush hours.
–Rose Yu
