If you want to buy a car, you have to enter the plate lottery first. Unless you have some serious guanxi, it will take a few years for your number to come up.
Wow. On the one hand that's pretty tough, but on the other it's presumably a semi-useful way to curb air pollution & traffic. I can only imagine what things would be like if it was a free-for-all.
It's hard to imagine that traffic in Beijing could get much worse. I think there are already a lot of people there who wouldn't have a car for city use, even without Beijing's restrictions on cars.
Most people in Beijing don't have cars, that is a scary thought.
Self driving cars will eventually allow Beijing to optimize traffic flows given the limited infrastructure that can be built for a city of its density. Until then, I'm a slave to didi dache.
