Owners of high-polluting and aging vehicles are being offered financial incentives to upgrade to something more environment-friendly, the city government said yesterday.

The payments range from 1,500 yuan (US$240) to 16,000 yuan, officials said.

Up to 160,000 high-emission vehicles will be taken off the city’s streets this year. They include those classed as yellow-label — gas and diesel vehicles that have failed the National I and III emission standards, respectively — and old gas-powered cars tuned to the National I and II standards.

As of the end of last year, there were more than 700,000 such vehicles in the city.

To encourage people to upgrade their vehicles, the city government will grant subsidies to owners of yellow-label cars who scrap them before the end of this year and to owners of old cars that are decommissioned before the end of next year.

From July, yellow-label vehicles will be banned from all roads within the S20 outer ring expressway, with the no-go zone being extended to the G1501 rural ring expressway from next April.

The rule will apply to all cars, regardless of where they were registered, and anyone who breaks it will be fined 200 yuan and receive three penalty points on their driving license, said Wang Meigen, deputy head of Shanghai traffic police.

A driver is allowed a maximum of 12 points a year.

High-polluting public buses will be among the first to be sent to the scrapheap, with more than 4,000 yellow-label vehicles set to be taken out of service from July 1. They will be replaced by new-energy alternatives, said Gao Yiyi, spokesman for the Shanghai Transportation Commission.

In another anti-pollution measure, the frequency of compulsory emissions testing will be increased — to three months for yellow-label cars and six months for cars more than 10 years old.

The tighter controls are part of the central government’s aim to eliminate 6 million yellow-label and old cars this year.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection said yellow-label cars accounted for 13 percent of China’s total number of vehicles last year, but produced 82 percent of the PM2.5 air pollution.