(Photo/Xinhua)

Cities in China are issuing guidelines to encourage shared parking to cope with the mounting pressure of the citizens who find it increasingly difficult to find a spot for their cars.

The gap of between parking supply and demand was as wide as 50 percent, said Qiu Xujian, an official from the Urban Construction Department of China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development in 2016.

Yan Liang, CEO and chairman of Chinese parking service provider Sunsea Parking also noted that China saw a deficit of at least 80 million parking spots.

It’s obviously not practical for urban managers to build new parking lots as land resources are not unlimited, so they resorted to other methods.

In general, most of the parking spaces in residential areas are empty during the day, but it happens to be the high-demand hours for urban nine-to-fivers. Therefore, governments are encouraging such a “mix-match” way of parking so as to make full use of the existing resources.

Shanghai was the first city to run the trial in 2015 and was later followed by a significant number of other cities.

Guangzhou, south China’s Guangdong province, is encouraging such kinds of parking solutions. It said that companies and individuals could entrust their parking spaces to parking lot managers or service providers that offer parking reservations.

Nanning in southwestern China’s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region is also calling on companies and residential projects to open their exclusive parking spaces to the public, encouraging property owners and property managing enterprises to share the parking lots during non-rush hour periods by means of internet platforms.

According to Wen Fei, owner of a parking space in Chengdu, southwestern China’s Sichuan province, he has earned over 7,000 yuan ($990) by sharing his parking space in the past one and a half years.

However, such an innovative solution is not welcomed universally, as some believe that the entry of public vehicles might increase the risks of the residential areas. In addition, some users of shared parking are not always punctual to take away their cars, and the frequent reneging is also reducing the passion of the property owners.

In this regard, officials of transportation departments are accelerating the making of relevant guidelines and policies so as to establish a sharing system that connects more resources and guarantees smoother operation.

Li Jin, chief researcher at the China Enterprise Research Institute, suggested that local governments establish a parking management system, integrate resources of parking spaces, and offer information to the citizens through smartphone applications, websites, and call centers.

In order to improve the motivation of both the supply and demand ends, Beijing has made an incentive mechanism and restriction mechanism to award the suppliers and constraint the users. Chengdu also decided this August to subsidize shared parking enterprises according to their performance.

So far, dozens of mobile applications concerning shared parking have been launched in each app market, and major Chinese cities are also joining the trends of shared parking initiatives.