How Chinese Superstition About the Number 4 Makes Beijing Traffic Worse (2024)

If you ever find yourself in crippling Beijing traffic, you might want to direct your road rage toward a numerical superstition rather than your fellow drivers.

China’s capital has a vehicle plate restriction program that’s intended to decrease congestion and air pollution around the city center. On weekdays, private cars with license plates ending in two digits, zero to nine, can’t drive inside Beijing’s 5th Ring Road from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. So if the pairing for a particular day is 4 and 9, for instance, then drivers with those tail numbers have to find another travel mode in the restricted zone.