Cars that don't have Shanghai number plates will be banned from the city's congested areas for longer duration during morning and evening rush hours from April 15, Shanghai police said yesterday.
Cars with non-local plates will now be barred from expressways from 7am to 10am and from 4pm to 7pm.
It is an extension of the current scheme that bars vehicles with outstation car plates from using the expressways from 7:30am to 9:30am and from 4:30pm to 6:30pm.
The roads that will be affected by the new measures are the same. They are Humin Elevated Highway, the Middle Ring Road, Huaxia Elevated Highway, Lupu Bridge and parts of Yan'an Elevated Highway, North-South Elevated Highway and the Inner Ring Road.
The measures however are not in place on weekends and public holidays.
The city's traffic officials said they expect the latest measures to relieve congestion in the city. But they said the city was struggling to deal with heavy traffic this year because of the construction of new Metro lines.
At the end of last year there were about 2.2 million vehicles with Shanghai plates, an increase of 194,000 at the end of 2013. The authority has set a limit — issuing just about 100,000 new plates every year. But it has failed to have an impact as the number of vehicles with non-local plates have been growing by 150,000 every year.
