In a dialogue with the online community, broadcast live by Xinhua on Monday, Pan Bo, the official in charge of managing parking in Beijing, said the capital has adopted new schemes like staggering the parking hours of public and private cars to best utilize limited parking space.

Under the arrangement, government and public institutions' parking lots are open at night, when they are unoccupied, to private cars, and government cars can be parked in garages of adjacent residential complexes, which are left idle during the daytime. This measure has shown good results, said Pan.

Shanghai is confronted with a similar, if not more severe, situation. The city has more than 1 million cars on its roads and the number is increasing by the day. Unlike Beijing, it does not yet have the audacity to enforce an even-and-odd number plate policy that allows private cars on roads on alternate days.

But proposals on easing the congestion and improving parking are a fixture when the local legislature convenes each year. Some lawmakers have suggested converting the space immediately under the city's elevated highways into parking lots, though that's obviously not feasible.

White elephant

Lawmaker Zhang Shiqing has been agitating for building multi-storied garages in neighborhoods so that vehicles can be parked vertically and orderly rather than scattered here and there. His advice sounds nice at a micro level, but it might be problematic if adopted on a grand scale. Imagine a high-rise parking lot towering above 50 meters. Such a steel-framed eyesore might not be approved in the first place, not to mention the jeers and sneers it would receive as a white elephant.

As a matter of fact, all the current proposals for resolving the parking problem reflect the view that public resources should gravitate toward car owners, not passengers or cyclists.

This again begs for the question: Who should have the right of way?

Last week the Xinmin Evening News ran a picture by photojournalist Yong He. The contrast it highlights is hard to miss.

Pedestrians in the photo are obliged to walk, even crab walk on sidewalks as narrow as their shoulders' width, whereas next to them cars whiz past on a wide street.

As you sow, so you will reap. China is now at the stage of reaping the bitter fruits of a policy that was once much touted but now looks increasingly flawed. Car ownership has grown by leaps and bounds in a decade but its by-product, the lack of parking, is only beginning to take its toll.

That's why after so many years of car boosterism, many are now reflecting on the words of those who objected to this vision and warned of its danger. Former premier Zhu Rongji recently made headlines with a new book of his speeches, to which he devoted a chapter on why he thought mass car ownership could only bode ill for China.

"I wish the authorities could now develop public transport more vigorously. If they had done so before, Beijing wouldn't be as congested as it is now," said the former premier.

Looking back, Zhu's views mostly prove foresighted. But as things stand, it'll take more than two or three politicians like Zhu to break the model of growth driven by the automobile industry and its powerful lobby.

Sadly, what we lack now most are officials who can look beyond their tenures and perhaps pause a while and look in the rear-view mirror to see how the race to affluence has left Chinese society in environmental and traffic shambles.