Beijing resident Zhang Yong considers himself lucky. In 2011, the Chinese capital introduced a lottery-style system for the allocation of licence plates that allows winners the right to buy a car.
The aim was to curb the purchase of new vehicles and ease choking traffic in the congested city. Mr Zhang applied that February and won the following month. Today, there are 3.3m applicants for such plates and 6,300 monthly winners — a success rate of 0.2 per cent.
Congestion costs hundreds of hours per capita each year for the world’s worst affected cities, of which, Moscow, Istanbul and Bogotá take the top spots, according to the Inrix 2018 global traffic scorecard, an annual analysis of metropolitan congestion.