One traffic jam after another, annoying horns, endless lines of cars, impatient sighs from passengers on an overcrowded bus, the you-stomped-on-my-toe quarreling in the subway train, all have led to the unsurprising result that Beijing scored at the tail end of a survey of 287 cities in the category of transport satisfaction in China's 2006 Report on the Quality of Urban Life.

"The last thing I would want is to live in Beijing!" a Beijing resident using the ID Birdflyzhi wrote on his blog, expressing his frequent dissatisfaction about the transportation headache he has suffered since he moved three years ago to this city, the political and cultural center of the most populous country in the world.

The traffic problem in Beijing involves a complex of historical, systemic reasons as well as urban development management and planning, according to Beijing Mayor Wang Qishan.

At the end of 2006, Beijing again emphasized the priority of developing public transport in its transportation development guidelines for the 11th Five-Year Plan period (2006-10).

To motivate more citizens to use public transport, the city decided to offer a 60 percent discount for bus riders who have a public transport IC card starting from January 1, 2007, which means most bus riders can take buses wherever they want at a mere cost of 0.4 yuan, setting a record for the lowest bus fee in the country.

As a result, many private car owners have begun to give up driving to work and resort to buses. "I now choose to take a bus to work as it takes 20 minutes less to take a bus than to drive my car to work because the bus drives in the exclusive bus lane during the rush hour, plus, it's much cheaper," said a Beijing resident surnamed Liu.

"Such a bus fee reform is aimed not only at the Olympics, but more importantly, it helps citizens develop the awareness and habit of using more public transport," said Ren Hai, Executive Director of the Olympic Studies Center under the General Administration of Sport. "Thus, both the traffic and living conditions in Beijing will be improved in the long run."

Greater pressure

The Beijing Traffic Management Bureau (BTMB) released figures in January showing that the city witnessed an increase of 374,000 motor vehicles in 2006, with the total reaching 2.88 million.

According to Song Jianguo, Director of the BTMB, the largest daily increase in vehicles was an unprecedented 2,400 on one day in January, and the total number is projected to reach 3.3 million by the time of the 2008 Olympic Games.

"The core of the traffic problem in Beijing is that the growth in road construction is out of step with the increase in vehicles. The number of vehicles can increase by the thousands on just one day but we cannot build a new road in the same time," said Cheng Xianghui, a member of the Beijing Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

"The city's vehicles are increasing by an average of 1,000 each day," noted Liu Xiaoming, Deputy Director of the Traffic and Transportation Administration Committee of Beijing Municipality. However, statistics from the BTMB show that the average growth rate of road construction in Beijing has been around 3 percent in recent years, far less than the increase in vehicles, which stands at 15 percent.

Traffic congestion, according to Liu Xiaoping, an engineer with the Beijing Railway Bureau, is an inevitable problem at a certain point not only for Beijing but also for other metropolises in the world. In this sense, dealing with the traffic problem is a common issue for large cities both at home and abroad.

The traffic bottleneck has a lot to do with the city's layout as well. "The traffic problem reflects the fact that the city's planning model doesn't fit its economic development when the economy advances to a certain level," he said.

The present layout of the city is like a set of concentric circles, with the inner city being at the heart and a large number of residential areas set around the fourth and fifth ring roads. Such a pattern leads to a tide-like flow between the inner city, where most residents work, and the outer circles, where they live, causing great tension on the city's traffic network.

"We should put a stop to building large-scale shopping centers in the inner city," Liu said. "As residential areas are moving outward, why cannot we also move commercial, medical and educational establishments to the outskirts of the city?"

Other factors contribute to the traffic headache in Beijing as well, such as people's disobedience of the traffic rules, the unscientific design of the roads and inefficient traffic management methods, said Song of the BTMB.

Public transport

As the city is witnessing rapid economic development and the approach of perhaps the most significant international event ever held in the country-the 2008 Olympic Games-Beijing is feeling pressed to solve, or at least ease, the chronic transportation problem.

Many transportation experts have reached the consensus that developing public transport is vital to resolving the problem in Beijing. "I think it is essential to promote public transport to alleviate the city's traffic pain," said An Shi, a professor at Harbin Industrial University.

Liu Xiaoming of the Traffic and Transportation Administration Committee of Beijing Municipality noted that the road resources taken up by cars are five or six times that of public transport vehicles. With the same number of passengers, cars occupy 68.9 percent of the road resources while public transport only takes up 10.2 percent.

In 1996, the country's public transport use ratio stood at some 20 percent, while today the ratio has fallen to 10 percent. Meanwhile, in Beijing the ratio has dropped to 20 percent from 30-40 percent a decade ago, a huge disparity from that in some developed countries, which reaches about 70-80 percent.

In this regard, the Beijing Municipal Government and the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG) released the Beijing Olympic Action Plan back in 2002. A guideline for the future social and economic development of the city and for the preparation of the Olympic Games, the plan embodies the concept of "development for the Olympics, the Olympics for development." One important part of the plan is to boost the development and management of public transit system.

The plan said it will promote the modernization of the road network construction and traffic management in Beijing, aiming at providing convenient, quick, safe, orderly and efficient services. The construction of a rail transport system, urban road systems, inter-city transport systems and city transport hubs will be accelerated.

According to the plan, the city will focus on the construction of an urban rail network consisting of such projects as the Beijing Urban Light Rail, Batong Subway Line, Subway Line No. 5, Subway Line No. 4, the Olympic Subway Line and the express rail from Dongzhimen to Beijing Capital International Airport. By 2008, 148.5 km of new rail transport will be added, reaching a total of 202 km, and the subway will carry about 10 percent of the passengers in the city.

The plan also said it will continue to optimize the public transport network by developing BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) and setting up more bus lanes on the roads and more bus routes.