City of Beijing Implementing Traffic Congestion Fees to Slow New Car Registrations
January 2013 NASA satellite image of air pollution near the Chinese capital of Beijing
The municipality of Beijing, China is going to be implementing traffic congestion fees on vehicles by 2017 to address increased air pollution. The plans were revealed as the city government published a five-year plan to deal with that pollution. Parking fees would also be increased and the areas where only locally registered cars and trucks are permitted to be used will be expanded. At the end of last year, Beijing had more than 5.2 million registered vehicles and city officials would like to keep that number below 6 million by 2017. Three other cities in China besides Beijing restrict new car and light truck sales, Shanghai, Gungzhou and Guiyang.
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Remember, pollution controls are overly restrictive in the United States. I suspect a lot of this also has to do with coal burning electric plants. Pretty soon the Chinese will learn the hard way that indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels causes massive problems...just like we learned 50-60 years ago.
I'd say they've already figured it out, it's why they built one of the world's largest hydroelectric dams and are building a large number (32) of modern nuclear power plants.
Beijing municipality also limits new vehicle registrations with a lottery system for license tags. It doesn't seem to have much of a dent in the growth of new vehicles on the roads.
The source of this pollution is a massive number of coal-fired electric plants, and mostly unrestricted pollution from industrial sources. Running that pea soup through an internal combustion engine with a catalytic converter might just make it a bit cleaner! (Maybe not, but relatively, almost cleaner!)