Beijing, China has recently announced that they are implementing new rules that will see all vehicles banned from that city center except for those the government deems to be “green vehicles”.

The new policy is designed to reduce traffic congestion and improve air quality in the highly polluted Beijing city center. All vehicles will be given certain colored labels which would designate what parts of the city they are allowed to be driven in. The city center will be accessible only by those vehicles labeled as green.

As you might expect this will be a bit of logistical nightmare and city officials are already finding a hurtle in that a lot of the trucks that bring food in from rural areas to the city center are far from being “green”.

Beijing, China has recently announced that they will extend the car restrictions that they had implemented before the Olympics, effectively reducing the city’s fast growing private car population by a fifth every day.

Chinese officials claim that the restrictions have already kept emissions down by 375 tons a day, which is about 10 percent. A new measure to extend a ban on high-polluting vehicles from the center to cover the whole city will save a similar amount, meaning a total emission reduction of about 750 tons of emissions, or 20 percent.

These newly solidified weekday rules, which take a fifth of the city’s constantly growing army of privately owned cars off the roads every day, restrict cars based on the last digit of their license plate numbers. Those ending in 0 or 5 are restricted from driving on Monday, those ending in 1 or 6 will be banned on Tuesday, and so on, you get the idea.

The city’s transportation committee think that these new rules will take 930,000 of the city’s 3.6 million vehicles off the road each day of the week and increase driving speeds by 10 percent.

This is a good step for China, whose pollution problem is becoming one of the worst in the world. This car ban is a good start, but the nation needs to take a real look at alternatives to just restricting usage, and start investing into more sustainable long term initiatives.