Zhao Jie, a scholar from the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, said it was still not too late for Beijing to pay attention to its urban planning.

"Beijing is bound to grow bigger as it is at the middle period of its urbanization and Beijing's population will keep increasing for the next two decades," Zhao said.

Beijing has activated plans to develop three of its suburban areas into satellite cities, including Tongzhou in the east, Shunyi in the north and Yizhuang in the south. All three areas have been linked to downtown areas by subways.

Bottlenecks

Zhao said a great barrier to the implementation of Beijing's new congestion-tackling measures would be whether different government departments would give their full cooperation.

"The measures include a wide range of policies from urban planning to public transport upgrades, which, I am afraid, will exceed the jurisdiction of the BMCT and requires a cross-department coordination mechanism to ensure its implementation," Zhao said.

Many people have attributed the failure of previous traffic improvement efforts in Chinese cities to the ill enforcement caused by the lack of cooperation between different government departments.

For example, one day after the BMCT publicized its draft plan to curb traffic jams for public feedback, the government of the Beijing's downtown Xicheng District unveiled a plan to expand the Financial Street, a bustling city-center business zone, to areas between the South Second Ring Road and South Third Ring Road. Such a blueprint is clearly contradictory to the BMCT's plan, which says Beijing will "strictly limit new construction in its inner city areas."

A report in the January issue of Caijing magazine said the lack of coordination between different government departments in tackling traffic problems was also reflected by their refusal to share data with each other.

The report said all government departments whose work is traffic-related considered their data to be secret. Allegedly, none of the research organizations with projects on Beijing's traffic have access to the comprehensive traffic data.

Chen said when Beijing built its Subway Line 13, a comfortable walking distance of transit between the new line and existing Line 2 could have been achieved if Beijing's traffic authorities had reached an agreement with the railway authorities on using a land owned by the latter. But negotiations between the two departments under different supervising authorities failed eventually, which resulted in an inconveniently long walk for passengers in transit that takes at least 15 minutes.

Professor Shi Qixin, former Director of the Institute of Transportation Engineering of Tsinghua University, suggests traffic authorities adopt more technological innovations, such as smart traffic management system, to reduce jams, which also requires cooperation of different departments.