Beijing to improve parking systems

Areas in Beijing need to improve their electronic parking systems as a number of devices have been shown to be recording the wrong license plates, a Xinhua News Agency magazine reported on Tuesday.

The report further said that an app used for parking services takes too long to verify for some users.

Three districts in the capital since Jan 1 have rolled out electronic parking meters to improve order on the city's roads.

More than 13,000 electronic parking meters have been installed along the roads in Beijing's Dongcheng, Xicheng and Tongzhou districts.

A total of 7.97 million electronic car parking service tickets have already been issued for roadside parking tolls in the districts, according to Beijing Municipal Commission of Transport statistics.

However, 0.3 percent of tickets have encountered problems.

"It's not a small amount and more than 20,000 car drivers might be affected," said Zhao Zhen, director of the static traffic management department of the city's transport commission.

By the end of 2019, all roads in Beijing will apply electronic parking tolls through a mobile app.

But some car owners said the app sometimes takes more than a week to verify and that the app's design is not user-friendly.

Wang Jiong, deputy director of the Beijing Parking Management Center, said the institute had added manpower to investigate and solve bugs in the app.

Xicheng district in the capital will also put 30 new monitoring devices into use by the end of June to strengthen the supervision of its electronic parking system, according to Gao Jun, deputy director of the Xicheng traffic police detachment.