When Car Lottery Becomes Normalcy: A Municipal Effort to Reduce Traffic Congestions
When you are driving on the streets of a large city, there are many things that you may have concerns about: the misery of parking, the rising fuel prices compared with that of the suburbs, or running into a bad driver. However, all of these issues seem less annoying when there is a bumper-to-bumper traffic that costs you hours on the road, especially when you have an appointment with your friend or doctor. This is also the case in my city. In fact, since 2011, my city government has implemented a series of regulations to reduce traffic congestion. Among these, the most controversial one is a system called “license plate lottery”, which works about the same as a regular lottery, with the winners getting a license plate for their cars.
At first, a license plate lottery may sound like an interesting game for many people. However, it sounds less fun when they find the lottery is the only way for them to receive a license plate. Without it, they cannot drive their cars onto any road. The license plate lottery usually takes place every other month, and anyone who is interested in applying will need to submit their information to the online system, which randomly selects and approves a number of applications. In this April’s lottery, only 6,366 out of 1.84 million applicants in my city were selected, yielding a percentage lower than 4% (Global Times, 2020).
The license plate lottery is designed to control the number of cars in the city and reduce traffic jams. Nevertheless, there are many controversies centering around it. For example, because the lottery system follows a random allocation, it does not favor anyone who files the application earlier. A person can join the lottery for 6 years without winning it, while another applicant can win the lottery in 3 months. This astounding contrast causes dissatisfaction among many drivers since they believe the lottery should be built on a first-come, first-serve basis. Those who keep joining the lottery pool for 8 years probably have a dire need to use the car compared with those who just joined. In order to solve this kind of problem, some applicants in Beijing will ask their family members to join the lottery together to increase the chance of winning. In some cases, a family can win more than once. However, for individual applicants who do not have their families in Beijing, this measure will put them at disadvantage. A fuming netizen commented: “So I don’t deserve a car if I’m not married?”(Caixin Global, 2020). This shows the frustration of many Beijing citizens who have not yet won the license plate lottery.
Although the lottery controls the total number of cars on the streets and mitigates the need for more parking lots, it failed to solve the problem with traffic, as the traffic jams in Beijing are still horrendous, especially during rush hours on weekdays. For instance, when I was doing my internship on the west side of the city, it took me more than an hour to get through traffic, while on a day without heavy traffic, the commute only cost about half an hour.
The government of Beijing has announced that a lottery reform will take place next June that allows those who enter the lottery early to have a higher chance of winning. Yet, I’d like to learn if this measure is more about other measures that can effectively solve traffic congestion. Other than that, I would also like to look into the problem with public transportation within the city and study why people would rather prefer to get their own cars instead of taking public transportation. More importantly, I would like to find out other ways that can help mitigate traffic congestion in the city.
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