Gas Station

On 1996, I spent 5 weeks in Beijing and I did not see any gas station neither in the city centre nor in subburbs. Also two years later, when I was back in Beijing for three months stay, I did not see any gas stations again and this was odd for me.
By the way, at that time, there were very few city cars in circulation and buses had their own gas stations in the bus station, so I did not care about that too much.
It was 6 years ago, when I spent a full year in China, visiting different cities , it was then that I started noticing it as a strange thing.
Now I'm in China again and everywhere I can see gas stations.
Traffic had increased a lot and the number of cars decupled. China Auto Weekly repots that last year nearly 4 milions cars were solt, and forecast for this year says that 5 millions will be reached.
Speacking with Chinese friends, I was told that in a city like Hangzhou (a medium city for China) every week, 1000 new cars are enrolled, even to drive a car you have to pay for: drive licence, insurance, parking and gas fee, of course (from the beginning of this year his price has incresed by 30%, reaching 4 RMB per liter - it means nearly 0,45 cents of euro).
Moreover, for driving in China, every month you have to pay also a road tax, dependig on the horse power of the car. For cars like Audi or Mercedez (the most popular among rich Chinese people) you have to pay a road tax higher than 200 rmb/month.
At the moment, not many Chinese can afford such high costs, but it is forseeable that in 5 years a large number of people will be able to afford it, especially when you see the number of city cars, queueing on Peking's traffic jam, groving year by year.
I cannot imagine such a mess, but globalization means also that, isn't it?