The municipal government reported Monday that government vehicles in the city have been cited for traffic violations 193 times from July to October 2012.

The General Office of the Shanghai Municipal Government urged city officials in its report to consider the violations as a warning. The report is part of a broader effort to improve how city departments manage their employee vehicles.

The municipal government has been implementing reforms since 2009 that it hopes will help reduce administrative costs by preventing personal use of government vehicles and cutting vehicle budgets for departments across the city.

On nationwide basis, each government vehicle costs an estimated 60,000 yuan ($9,102) annually, including expenses for fuel, maintenance and drivers' salaries, according to a past report in the Economic Information Daily.

In its report on government vehicle traffic violations, the General Office asked leaders at different levels of government to serve as an example for their underlings by encouraging their drivers to abide by the rules of the road.

It also ordered the cited individuals to accept the violations and pay the fines without delay.

The total number of violations remains far too high, said Sun Honglin, a delegate of the Shanghai People's Congress. "That figure means that a government vehicle gets cited for a traffic violation at least twice a day in the city," Sun told the Global Times.

In many cases, government officials still consider themselves superior to others and can easily make a traffic ticket disappear with a phone call to the local traffic police, Sun said.

Although the municipal government never released the exact number of government vehicles in the city, a study by the CPPCC Shanghai Committee in 2009 found that there were about 200,000 at all levels of the city's government, according to a report on the Guangdong-based news portal dayoo.com.

According to regulations that the Shanghai Municipal Development and Reform Commission instituted in 2009, local government departments must cut their employee vehicle budgets so they are at least 15 percent lower than the average vehicle budget over the previous three years.

The regulations also tightened rules on vehicle purchasing so that government departments can only buy new employee vehicles to replace older ones that can no longer be maintained.