Construction of parking lots still in slow lane (3)

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Parking in inappropriate places, such as bus lanes, often results in traffic jams in downtown Beijing. Provided to China Daily

Coordinating authority

Zhu Tao, a lecturer at the school of sociology at Beijing University of Technology, said an overall coordinating authority should be established to tackle the capital's parking problems.

"There's a lack of focused management, and governance is weak. The municipal government should think about giving power to a parking authority that could handle all the issues such as planning, building and pricing the lots, plus regulating and managing all the facilities and their use," he said. Zhu suggested that the city government could learn from the experiences of other large cities, both in China and overseas.

Shanghai, one of China's largest municipalities, is also exploring developments in the field of parking.

By June 2012, the city had 389,000 parking lots, providing space for 80 million cars annually, according to Zhou Huai, deputy director of the Shanghai Transportation and Harbor Administration at a media briefing held by the local government.

To improve the efficiency of public parking lots, the city has set up 267 information boards in the downtown districts of Huangpu, Xuhui, Jing'an, Changning and Yangpu. The boards provide drivers with information about the availability, location and fees of 193 parking lots in those areas, said Zhou.

The city will also add more than 10,000 parking spaces this year. They will be located in residential areas and close to hospitals and schools, according to the news portal People, which cited the Shanghai Static Traffic Management Work Conference.

In Beijing, the State-run Beijing Gonglian Co is the biggest player in the field of parking management, far overshadowing its rivals. That's an unhealthy situation, according to Ding.

"A lack of efficient competition in the market and an unfair pricing system means the parking business in Beijing is in poor shape," he said. Ding urged greater competition among parking-management companies and also suggested that communities and government departments should allow drivers to rent prepaid parking spaces that are unoccupied during the day when their owners are at work: "In this way, the pressure on the side-of-the-road parking areas would be alleviated, and we could make full use of these temporarily unoccupied spaces."

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