The NY Times reports about Beijing's use of a vehicle registration lottery to attempt to reduce traffic congestion in Beijing.   Since such lotteries do not raise the marginal cost of driving at congested rush hour times, they will not reduce road congestion.  Siqi Zheng and I discuss the economics of car ownership and use in China's cities in our recent 2016 book;  Blue Skies Over Beijing (you can read chapter 1 here).

A more subtle point is that we know how to "solve traffic congestion".  Watch this video of Singapore's Electronic Road Pricing.    Due to this policy, vehicles move at 40 MPH at any time.  Since the roads are priced, this nudges people to use public transit. When middle class people use public transit, this creates an interest group of demanders and thus politicians supply high quality public transit.  The net effect is a city that you can move around in and this increases the gains from being in a city as the gains to trade across the city can be enjoyed.

It is true that Singapore's taxes for buying a vehicle are quite high.  Beijing could have lower purchase prices but introduce high peak time road pricing.

Why has Beijing ignored these lessons learned from Singapore? This raises the issue of why the Communist Party chooses to use quantity regulation rather than price regulation? What do Communists have against Hayek?  Use the price system to signal scarcity!!