Adoption of Car Restriction Policies Across 287 Chinese Municipalities

With rapid auto growth, many Chinese municipalities implemented car restriction policies. Research identified several groups of underlying factors that possibly prompted the municipalities to adopt the policies, but no study has yet systematically evaluated these factors. The authors collected a panel dataset for all 287 Chinese municipalities from 2001 to 2014, extracted information of car restriction policies from 116 legal documents and other online resources. Duration models were used to assess the statistical significance and the predictive accuracy of 14 indicators measuring economic power, population, air pollution, automobiles, urban density, and local transportation conditions in predicting the adoption of large-scale car restriction policies, supplemented by the cross-examination with text analysis of policy documents. The authors found that the adoption of large-scale car restriction policies primarily responded to air pollution and secondarily to motor per capita and congestion. Policy adoption responded to local subway line constructions, but not other transportation or land use conditions. Local economic power and population size cannot effectively explain policy adoption. Idiosyncratic effects at provincial or city levels were important, although the underlying mechanism was unclear. Broadly, the findings suggest that 1) Chinese municipalities were partially rational in making policies to address local problems; 2) legal documents were reliable to illustrate the real motivations of policies.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ABE90 Standing Committee on Transportation in the Developing Countries.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Wang, Shenhao
  • 0000-0003-4374-8193
  • Zhao, Jinhua
  • 0000-0002-1929-7583
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2019-1-13 to 2019-1-17
• Date: 2019

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 5p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Air pollution; Automobiles; Cities and towns; Policy analysis; Traffic congestion; Traffic restraint
• Uncontrolled Terms: Vehicle restrictions
• Geographic Terms: China
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Policy;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01697407
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 19-05443
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 1 2019 3:50PM