In Beijing, a megacity of over 21 million residents, parking shortages have transcended the phenomenon of "the difficulty of finding one parking space" and have become a precise lens through which to analyze the contradictions of urban development at a deep level. The battle for parking spaces in Tiantongyuan, Dongwangzhuang Village, Dingfuzhuang East Street, and other communities reflect the unbalanced spatial resource distribution jointly produced by short-sighted planning, resource mismatches, and the lack of institutions.
When refined governance is realized in the central urban area through electronic pricing and off-peak shared parking, communities in the suburbs are still struggling amid lagging planning and governance vacuums. The mismatch in spatial resource allocation is a concentrated reflection of Beijing’s uneven urban development.
1. Historical Problems of Planning Imbalance: Short-sighted Blueprints and Mismatched Functions
Looking back at the developmental history of Beijing, the lack of foresight during planning and the unbalanced functional configuration have become the core historical roots of the parking plight. As a typical example, Tiantongyuan developed the plight at the beginning of planning. Located at the boundary between Chaoyang and Changping districts, this community spans 8 square kilometers, with a planned building area of more than 6 million square meters. It is located at the center of the northern Olympic zone, about 3 kilometers from the Olympic Forest Park. It is flanked by the Beijing-Lhasa Expressway to the west and the Beijing-Chengde Expressway to the east, with Litang Road running through the community from south to north. Subway Lines 5, 13, and 17 intersect here, complemented by many bus routes. The traffic network is well developed. The community consists of five sub-areas—Tiantongyuan, East Tiantongyuan, West Tiantongyuan, North Tiantongyuan, and Central Tiantongyuan, including 16 zones and more than 700 buildings. The Western Zone is to the west of Subway Line 5, and the No.1 Western Zone has the lowest floor-area ratio and the highest living comfort. The Northern Zone is to the east of Subway Line 5 and close to Tiantongyuan Subway Station, with mainly low-rise and six-story slab buildings and a few high-rise tower buildings. To the south of the Northern Zone, the Central Zone is the last phase of buildings delivered in Tiantongyuan, with good overall quality, while the southern sections are the oldest in the community. The Eastern Zone is to the east of the Central and Northern Zones.
According to a May 2025 Sina News report, about 300,000 residents now live in Tiantongyuan. Taking the Tiantongyuan North Street as an example, there are about 140,000 permanent residents, and 21% are aged over 60 years.
The supporting educational resources here are severely insufficient. There are only five primary schools within an area of 8 square kilometers. Competition for places at the Branch of Changping No.1 Middle School reaches 8:1. The queuing time in the Emergency Department of Changgung Hospital before expansion was longer than three hours. The commercial center, Longde Plaza, serves a radius of less than 500 meters. Residents in the Western Zone need to traverse the entire community for basic shopping. The rate of business homogeneity in the community reaches 70%. The collection rate of property management fees across more than 700 buildings is lower than 60%. The proportion of group rental is higher than 15%, and the compliance rate of garbage-sorting is only 45%. The above contradictions stem from a deeper structural imbalance in Beijing's urban functions. Data show that the central urban area concentrates 60% of the permanent residents, 70% of the employed population and GDP, 83% of scientific institutes and universities, and 67% of medical facilities. The "monocentric agglomeration" mode leads to a gradient decline in the distribution of urban resources.
Imbalanced Distribution of Urban Utility Spaces in Beijing (2014-2024)
Compared to the 1:3.1 job-residence ratio of the metropolitan area in Tokyo, Beijing's ratio of 1:1.3 has directly resulted in the severe separation of production and living functions. The separation forces residents of Yuxinzhuang Village, Changping, and other "urbanized villages" to commute over long distances daily, forming a "peripheral residence-central employment" mobility pattern. When planning fails to predict population circulation and the process of motorization, the inherent lack of spatial justice eventually manifests itself in the form of parking shortages and other problems.
2. The Battle for Spatial Resources: Institutional and Managerial Mismatches
Beijing's urban spatialresource allocation shows a pronounced "core-periphery" divide, which
leads to three contradictions in the distribution of parking spaces.
● Gaps inpublic service provision: Although commercial centers, hospitals, and primary schools were built in Tiantongyuan, the lack of an internal micro-circulation traffic system leads to a surge of through-traffic. The No.1 Western Zone is adjacent to Litang Road and the Subway Line 13, which makes it a "severely afflicted area" of shortcut-driving vehicles and further encroaches on
property owners' parking spaces.
● Unclear property rights: Due to a dispute between the developer and the village committee, 845 underground parking spaces in Houshayu New Village have remained idle for seven years, and residents are forced to park in fire lanes. The phenomenon of "dormant garages" reveals the institutional blind spot of collectively owned construction land circulation.
● Lagging policy updates: One hundred forty parking spaces were added after the redevelopment of Dongwangzhuang Village in Haidian, but they are far from sufficient for its 900 residents. This form of "shoring up weak links" exposes the disparities in resource investment in urban upgrades: 17,000 parking spaces were newly added to the central urban area, while the suburbs relied largely on "self-service digging of potential space."
What is behind the battle for resources is theunbalanced public service allocation. When the core zone implements the policy of "infill greening" to construct the Guangyanggu Urban Forest, residents in Tiantongyuan continue to fight for basic parking rights. In essence, the difference is caused by ambiguous institutional planning.
3. The Paradox of Sustainable Development: Economical and Environmental Mismatches
The parking plightreflects multiple paradoxes faced by the sustainable development of megacities.
When a smart parking system was implemented in Tiantongyuan in 2007, these contradictions emerged simultaneously:
● Failure of economic rationality: The shift from a monthly payment system to hourly charging (1 RMB per two hours) made residents' daily costs of cross-regional child pick up or shopping surge. If property owners in the No. 1 Eastern Zone wanted to pick up their children in the No. 3 Western Zone, they needed to pay multiple times, raising travel cost by 300%.
● Alienation of technological empowerment: Although the system lowered the vehicle theft rate, its technical application deviated from the reality of the community. Fourteen thousand vehicles were not guaranteed fixed parking spaces, making the smart system become a "tool for precise charging."
● Squeezed ecological space: The development intensity of the plain area in Beijing reaches 46%, with about 1,163 square kilometers of construction land used for the ecological structure of "One Screen, Two Rings, and Nine Wedges." The expansion of parking spaces and ecological conservation fall into a zero-sum game. After a tiny multi-level garage in Andexinju occupied the community's green space, residents complained, "A huge patch of land is occupied, and we have no space to exercise."
The contradiction at a deeper level is the natural conflict between green urban development and rising motorization. As the first megacity to reduce its developmental scale, Beijing has reduced 150 square kilometers of construction land in rural and urban areas. Meanwhile, motor vehicle ownership has exceeded 7 million, widening the supply-demand gap.
"We didn't anticipate that the increase in vehicles could be so rapid during community planning." The property management company of Tiantongyuan's comment reveals the fundamental contradiction between static thinking in the planning stage and the city's dynamic development. When ecological restriction requires reducing construction land, while motorization calls for more space, the city falls into a dilemma.
4. Management Difficulties: Responsibility without Accountability
The plight of parking governance points to thestructural defect of the urban governance system, and typical cases reveal governance malfunctions in different dimensions:
● Failed scale-based governance: The need for managing 14,000 vehicles in Tiantongyuan far exceeds the capacity of the property management company, and responsibilities among security teams, property managers, residents' committees, and others are vague. After the smart system was introduced, missing rules caused residents' resistance.
● Unclear matching of authority and responsibility: 60% of the 80 parking spaces in the Dingfuzhuang East Street community were occupied by external vehicles. The property management company shifted blame to "parking spaces without ownership can't be managed"; residents' committees lacked enforcement power, and township governments avoided intervention. The "three-party prevarication" results in a persistent management vacuum.
● Governance lag: One hundred forty parking spaces were added after the renovation of Dongwangzhuang Village, but no subsequent management mechanism was established. The wasteland west of the village remained idle, reflecting a path dependency of "prioritizing construction over governance."
Governance fragmentation is aggravated byadministrative divisions. Tiantongyuan's location at the juncture of Chaoyang and Changping districts renders it a place "ignored by both districts." The division leads to a lack of overall management of traffic planning. Wanting to avoid traffic on Chaoyang District’s Litang Road, vehicles pass through the No. 1 Western Zone, redirecting traffic pressure to the
community roads in Changping District.
At a deeper level liethe issues of inadequate policy delineation and execution.
● Roadside parking fees are collected as fiscal income, but the renovation of old communities relies on self-funding by subdistricts, which forms "a broken funding cycle."
● The Catalogue of Prohibition and Restriction for Newly Added Industries strictly controls parking space supply in the core zone but supporting policies in suburban areas are lagging.
● The proportion of land used by collective industries reaches 32% (compared to 20% in Shanghai and 10% nationally), but its transformation into parking facilities faces regulatory barriers.
5. Spatial Justice Reconstruction: A Three-Pillar Governance Framework
It is necessary to formulate a systematic plancombining "spatial reconstruction, functional optimization, and institutional innovation" to overcome the parking plight.
Spatial resource reallocation
● Replicable models: Through "ground-to-vertical transformation," the number of parking spaces in Dongcheng District’s Ganmian Hutong increased from 30 to 80. The same method can be implemented in other communities such as Tiantongyuan.
● Resource reutilization: The Guideline for Transforming Idle Space into Parking Facilities should be formulated, mandating resolution of ownership disputes such as the case of Houshayu within five years. Release 50,000 idle parking spaces by 2025.
● TOD (Transit-Oriented Development) restructuring: Construct "parking-residence-business" complexes at subway terminals such as Shahe in Changping District, reducing commuting demands through a job-residence equilibrium.
Economic mechanism reconstruction
Shared parking 2.0: Require state-owned enterprises to open parking lots during 21:00-7:00 at a low price (for example, Beijing Public Transport Group released 3,000 nighttime parking spaces). Implement "community monthly passes" (applicable to Tiantongyuan).
Residential certification system: Expand the scope of certified roadside parking (112,000 vehicles at present), and tenants in urban villages may apply for discounted parking spaces with registered contracts.
PPP (Public-Private-Partnership) innovation: The government contributes land as equity investment, while enterprises invest in constructing smart garages, with profits shared proportionally (recommended split: 70%:30%).
Governance system reconstruction
● Legal safeguards: The Motor Vehicle Parking Regulations of Beijing should be revised, giving property management companies the right to tow vehicles that illegally occupy parking spaces and specifying the responsibilities of overall street arrangement.
● Community empowerment: Promote the self-governance convention model of Xiangyang Dongli Community, allowing property owners to vote on formulating tiered fee rules (e.g., waive the parking fee of property owners' first vehicle, and tenants should be charged on a graded basis).
● Digital governance: Build a "citywide parking brain," integrating the data of 700,000 parking spaces into the MaaS system, which could improve navigation efficiency by 30%.
Beijing’s parking difficulty reflects the contradictions of megacity transformation at a deeper level. Idle parking spaces in Houshayu and chaotic competition in Tiantongyuan coexist, which reveals not only resource misallocation, but also systemic inequality in distribution. The 150-square-kilometer construction land reduced in ten years can hardly meet the increasing need of 7 million motor vehicles, and the crux lies in the fact that planning fails to reconcile efficiency with equity.
The key to solving the problem lies in establishing a differentiated compensation mechanism: in core zones, parking fees should be used to subsidize suburban construction; in newly developed zones, public services should be leveraged to incentivize population relocation, and urban villages should protect tenant rights with "self-governance funds." It is also necessary to revise Parking Regulations to establish a "parking space bank" system to mandate the provision of parking spaces in new development projects.
Parking is not simply a technical problem; it is a scale to measure urban civilization. It speaks to residents' happiness index, as well as their equal right to urban space. Only by embedding the "human-centered logic" into spatial reproduction can Beijing write a new social contract of fairness amid reduced development.