China Youth Daily: The limit of electric vehicles cannot be cut across the board

The relevant authorities of Shenzhen Municipality issued a notice a few days ago that from June 6 to December 5, electric vehicles will be prohibited on the 24 hours in the main area of ​​the city. Many people in Shenzhen think that this move has the purpose of facilitating people to travel. In recent years, traffic accidents related to electric vehicles have become more frequent, affecting traffic safety and traffic efficiency. Relevant authorities should also rectify this problem. However, in the process of rectifying electric vehicles in Shenzhen, it is arbitrarily too arbitrary to adopt a simple “24-hour ban on electric vehicles”.

Electric vehicles are favored by the majority of working-class workers because of their features such as low cost and high speed. In Shenzhen alone, the number of electric vehicles is as high as 500,000. Simply prohibiting the passage of electric vehicles will directly leave 500,000 electric vehicles equivalent to several hundred million yuan worth of assets. At the same time, it will put tremendous pressure on the public transport sector. Although Shenzhen strives to promote the perfection of the urban public transport network and restart the bicycle lanes in an attempt to break down the “power cut” pressure, its investment will be unfair, and its completion speed may not be able to keep pace with it. Moreover, simply prohibiting the passage of electric vehicles will bring new challenges to the small-scale transportation industry such as express delivery, and the increase in transportation costs will eventually be passed on to consumers. It can thus be seen that this kind of "one-size-fits-all" power cut order will bring about a series of chain effects that are detrimental to the people's production and life.

Of course, Shenzhen's "power cut order" is not unpredictable. In Shenzhen, the penalty for violations of electric vehicles in the past three years was as many as 260,000. The electric vehicle problem in Shenzhen is undoubtedly the epitome of the problem of 120 million electric vehicles in the country. It reflects the serious safety problems of electric vehicles. However, it needs to be emphasized that the crux of the problem stems largely from the incompleteness of the system. One of the main reasons why some electric vehicle owners dare to travel in accordance with traffic regulations is that the management system of electric vehicles is not perfect. Some cities have not yet assigned attributes to electric vehicles so that electric vehicles can both take motorized roads and grab non-motorized vehicles. Both "slowly" and "hairline".

On March 18 this year, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued notices requesting the electric vehicle industry to carry out rectification. All electric vehicles that have a speed of more than 20 kilometers per hour and a vehicle weight of more than 40 kilograms in the market will be phased out. The ban aims to crack the safety of electric vehicles by setting limits on "speed" and "body weight." The ban at the national level is undoubtedly of constructive significance for the construction of a "bridging wild horse" that exceeds the standard electric vehicle. Some cities are also brewing local regulations, and the “Some Regulations on Road Traffic Safety in the Xiamen Special Economic Zone” will clearly adopt the “Registration+Limited” management approach.

In contrast, the bans of relevant departments in Shenzhen have focused on the “unsafe” and “unsightful” aspects of electric vehicles, while ignoring their “low-cost” and “zero emissions”, which inevitably lead to unfairness. In fact, people’s livelihood issues such as electric car travel should be viewed from a humanistic perspective, considered in multi-faceted thinking, and measured by the people’s appeals, so as not to fall into simple and brutal circumstances, People have the illusion of "lazy politics." This is more arduous and energy-consuming than an arbitrary "one size fits all" approach, but it is also more public and more popular.