Status quo of car parc in China
Car parc refers to the number of vehicles in use in a region, generally having registered in the area. However, car parc differs from vehicle parc by excluding motorcycles and agricultural vehicles. The car parc of China has been increasing exponentially due to the ever-increasing new vehicle registration every year. Guangdong used to lead country wide as the province hosting the most registered vehicles but was taken over by Shandong in 2014. Currently Guangdong hosts around 18.94 million registered vehicles while Shandong has about 19.3 million. Although, Guangdong has always been the province with the highest number of drivers since 2011, which stood at 34 million in 2017 whereas Shandong was only around 28 million. In 2017, small passenger vehicles were registered the most at over 24 million units while new registrations of other passenger vehicles ranged from almost 50 to 172 thousand units.
Problem and solutions
The effect of the constantly increasing car parc started showing in the last few years as heavy traffic jams and deteriorating air quality, particularly in Beijing. Some cities like Beijing introduced car plate policies to allow cars to be driven on a certain day depending on the last digit of the plate, which did not stop the car parc in China from increasing. Therefore, other measures were introduced to discourage car use, for example, in Beijing and Shanghai, one needs to win a complicated lottery process to earn a license plate before they can go on the road, which could cost more than the vehicle itself. However, despite the increase of car parc, Shenzhen and Guangzhou has announced to increase the quota of new license plates given out each month in 2019, and other cities in Guangdong cannot restrict the number of plates, since the authorities were looking to stimulate the vehicle sales and consumption in China after weak sales for the previous year.