Well, you think our traffic is bad? According to TreeHugger.com, “1,466 New Cars Added to Beijing Streets Every Day”. At this rate, they will add well over 100,000 cars in the first 3 months of this year. Yikes!
While reading the story on TreeHugger, I found the original source for this information is Reuters. In their piece about Congested Beijing, they mention an interesting tactic that has been implemented. To reduce congestion, they introduced rules based on the license plate numbers to remove a fifth of the cars each day on the roads.
Now, at first this seems a little crazy, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We may someday have to resort to a conservation scheme based on license plate numbers. Do you remember odd-even gas rationing of 1979? I do, that was the year I got my driver’s license and it was not pretty.
The Beijing plan is interesting in that they target only a fifth of the cars each day. So if you figure a 5 day working week, then you would only have to leave your car home just one day each week. Could you get a ride, use mass transit or work from home that one day? If everyone could follow this simple rule, we would immediately reduce our daily traffic and gas consumption by 20%.
We need to explore simple ideas like this while we still can. If we wait, then we will be forced to take more drastic measures in the future. The time to act is now, are you ready?
Friday, 14. August 2009
The same is implemented in Mexico City since 1989. Based on your plate and from Monday to Saturday. It’s a shame that it’s still one of the most crowded and polluted cities in the world.