涨停车费能控制私家车数量?

4月1日起北京三大类非居住区停车费进行调整，占道费也相应增加，占道车位每天将多交20元。擅自降价、私自打折等行为将从重处罚。但是这样是否能真正控制车子的数量？

Beijing has started charging higher parking fees since this month, as part of the measures to control the traffic. As a result, some ever crowded parking lots have become less occupied. However, does it really mean less people driving? Or is there another reason behind this phenomenon?

With higher parking fees, many people say they seldom drive their own car for the commute nowadays.

The parking fee is now ten yuan for the first hour, and after that it's 15 yuan per hour for a roadside car park inside the third-ring road and four other neighboring business areas between 7am and 9pm. The price has doubled.

In a roadside car park in crowded Zhongguanchun, most spaces are unoccupied. One administrator says he's seen about a 50 percent decrease of customers.

However, the scene is different in some other places. The spaces of roadsides, including pedestrian and sidewalks for the blind, are all crammed with parked cars. At the corner there is a signboard which reads "parking lot." When any driver parks their car on the roadside, a man who calls himself "administrator" comes over.

He says if you parking here for two hours, each hour costs 2.5 yuan, but if the driver pays ten yuan, he can park the car on the roadside for the whole day, but without an invoice. He also adds that many people who work at nearby office buildings tend to park their car here.

But where do such roadside parking spaces come from? The chengguan, or city administrators, say these are illegal parking spaces, although people can find parking lot signboards there and get invoices. If you look at the signboard, you may find it actually has no registration number authorized by the government.

And, after these so-called administrators collect their parking fees, they'll often leave rather than take care of the cars.

However, illegal parking lots are not the only problem brought by the higher parking fees. At some legal parking lots, administrators randomly give customers discounts, in a bid to attract more customers. As they say with the hiked fee, fewer customers came and parked their car. So they are earning much less than before.

Jia Yuanhua, professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, shares his opinion. "Although these parking lots are public resources, they are operated by commercial dealers. When the government raise parking fees, the profit of the dealers are influenced, therefore, they come up with countermeasures to ensure their profit, for instance, like what we have seen, by offering discounts or other deals."

Jia Yuanhua adds when the government carries out a new policy, there must be an effective monitoring system and reasonable profit-assignment mechanism with the new policy.

For CRI, I am Zhang Wan.