Recently the cost of hourly parking was increased across the whole of Beijing. Parking charges were quadrupled! They went up from RMB 2 per hour (about 20p) to RMB 8 per hour (about 80p). By comparison with the UK, this is still tiny, but for Beijingers parking is now a significant cost.

The intended effect was to try and move people out of cars and onto public transport as traffic here is rapidly approaching grid lock. I have to say that traffic does seem to have eased slightly. Many of the car parks are now almost empty and traffic flow on the main roads is slightly easier. This has got to be a positive move for an increasingly choked up city.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 6:40 am by duncanandjr and is filed under Letter from Beijing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.