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| It's more than a parking-at-home problem in Xi'an, which is about 300,000 parking spaces short of what it needs. These cars lined up outside a supermarket, waiting for someone to leave and open up a space, about 8 o'clock on a weeknight. [Photo/China Daily] |
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It is barely eight in the morning and the two levels of a hospital's car park are already full. A queue of backed-up vehicles snakes around the corner and onto a major street, causing a traffic jam. “Reverse, reverse, reverse,” barks an attendant, blowing on a whistle and pointing this way and that as he guides one car out to let another in. A young man, Yang Linfeng, seems untroubled by the chaos as he walks back to his car. In for his annual physical, he says he knew exactly what to expect: he came an hour early just to find a parking spot.
Similar scenes play out around China every day. Whether at hospitals, near schools and offices or outside popular restaurants and shopping malls—just about anywhere people congregate—parking has become a major aggravation of urban life. It is in some ways a good problem for China, a sign of growing prosperity. Car ownership is expanding by about 10% a year, even as the economy slows.
But it also suggests a flaw in the country’s approach to building cities. In their rush to construct roads and housing to accommodate the 400m people who have moved to cities from the countryside over the past two decades, officials have paid insufficient attention to many basics such as drainage and green spaces.
In March parking was identified as a priority in the prime minister’s annual report to parliament. China has a shortage of roughly 50m parking spaces. Its target is 1.3 parking spaces per car, the norm in richer countries (including residential parking). In China’s biggest cities, the ratio is 0.8. Smaller cities have just 0.5 spaces per car.
Frustration is spreading. In an official survey conducted over the past two months, nearly two-thirds of respondents said that parking had become “unbearable”. By contrast, only about a third said they lived in places with frequent traffic jams, a problem for which China is much more notorious. The two nuisances can be related. The harder it is to find a place to park, the more cars circle around and around.
One solution might be to build more car parks, but many apartment blocks were built before car ownership became common, so neighborhoods have limited space to build places to park.
Some cities have started to experiment with making parking spaces a prerequisite to buy a car. Would-be car owners must first show they have a space, an approach that Japanese cities have used successfully.
Cars jostle for cheaper roadside spots, leaving more expensive ones beneath office buildings underused. The occupancy of car parks in major new commercial buildings in Guangzhou, a southern city, never exceeds 58%.It would help to charge more for roadside parking, forcing drivers to use underground car parks.
Stricter enforcement of no-parking zones could curb superfluous parking demand in busy areas and encourage people to use public transport.
Many cities are investing huge sums in public transport and are also raising roadside parking fees together will illegal parking fines. In Wenzhou, an officer walks methodically up a line of cars parked under a no-parking sign next to a tall commercial building. He writes out a fine for each one and takes photos for use as evidence. But the car park inside the building is two-thirds empty.
An attendant there clearly doubts the efficacy of fines. “People here have so much money that they don’t know what to do with it. So they donate it to the traffic department.”
