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Drive cars from the city

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-14 08:27

Drivers are fuming about the hikes in downtown parking fees introduced on April 1 but, instead of parking their gas-guzzlers at home and taking public transport, which was what the people who introduced the fees hoped would happen, many motorists are thinking outside the box and looking for new parking possibilities.

Evidence of this was a recent online posting by a netizen called Song Le who drafted an article for a blog about the alternative parking available in the downtown.

Song's words of wisdom, entitled Tips on Parking Cars in Beijing 2010, was highlighted as a featured post on auto.mop, a popular automobile-obsessed forum. From there, its fame spread and within hours it was as popular as a Volkswagen Bug, popping up on hundreds of mainstream websites and seen by hundreds of thousands.

The posting maps out ways drivers can continue to join the snail-like procession downtown each morning in their four-wheeled dinosaurs and snag a free or cheap parking space when they get there, despite the high cost of legitimate parking in the city center.

Drive cars from the city

The document maps out cheap pay-parking lots in Dongcheng, Xicheng, Chaoyang, Haidian, Xuanwu, and Chongwen districts and also guides drivers toward hitherto untapped free parking paradises in hutong, residential communities and even parking lots owned by banks, restaurants and supermarkets.

Unwritten and unsaid in the document, but no doubt understood by all, was the inescapable fact that, if people from the burbs insist on saving a few yuan from their parking budgets by hogging the free spaces provided by banks, restaurants and supermarkets, then it will only get even more unpleasant out there for bank, restaurant and supermarket customers. And as for those who live in downtown residential communities that have free parking and for people in overlooked hutong, well, if you thought the parking situation where you live was bad before, you ain't seen nothing yet.

In an article in METRO on Monday, one car driver said she and her husband spend around 25,000 yuan a year on parking. While she was ticked off that the Beijing municipal commission of development and reform pushed parking fees up to as high at 15 yuan an hour for roadside downtown parking, she was in no mood to put her car into neutral and take transit.

It seems as though people would rather blow a gasket about having to pay an extra few yuan a day to park downtown than decide to take the subway instead and save hundreds of yuan a month.

For me, the strangest thing about Song's online sensation was not so much that someone was suggesting parking in banks, supermarkets, restaurants, hutong and residential complexes but that there are still drivers out there who are not doing it.

To me, it feels like every chunk of real estate, every few meters of sidewalk, every loading bay and every fire lane in the downtown area capable of accommodating so much as a Fiat Uno, is already jammed full of cars.

Which brings me to my point. If the authorities are going to make the parking fee hikes work as advertised, if they are going to nudge people toward the subway and buses instead of traffic jams, they will need to be backed up with enhanced enforcement of the traffic rules downtown so people do not simply use the hiked parking fees as an excuse to park in all those places they should not.

A good place to start would be in the city's many bike lanes that hug the side of our major thoroughfares.

It's bad enough that so many drivers insist on using cycle lanes as overtaking (or undertaking) lanes, and its enough of a hazard for cyclists that busses have to block their way every time they pick up and drop off passengers, but the thing that really ticks me off are all of those drivers who think the bike lanes are a good place to park, pushing cyclists further out into the road where we are honked at and cut up and generally treated like a lower form of life unworthy of being on the road in the first place.

If we could drive all those parked cars out of the bike lanes, making a two-wheeled commute safer and more enjoyable for those on bikes, the idea of riding a bicycle to work might appeal to more people.

So please, motorists, get out from behind the wheel and get on your bike.

Get fitter. Give yourself time to think about life, the universe and everything. Save all that money you spend on parking and gasoline and maintenance. Save yourself the headache of finding a parking space. Spare the rest of us from that pollution you make every day.

Best of all, find out that it doesn't take anywhere near as long as you think to get around this city by bike - you'd be surprised.