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One million cars go off Beijing roads

Beijing: China’s capital city embarked on a radical four-day-long experiment on Friday, ordering more than a million cars off the roads in an attempt to decongest the streets and flush the air of impurities.

The experiment is intended as a dummy run for an action plan that, if proven effective, will be operationalised during the Olympic Games next August.

Traffic-snarled streets and badly polluted air are two of the biggest concerns of the Olympic organisers.

Last week, the International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge warned that some events such as long-distance races might have to be postponed as pollution in the Games area was found to be so high as to affect the performance of athletes.

Since winning the Olympic bid in 2001 Beijing has spent billions of yuan moving steel mills and other polluting industries to the outskirts of town in an attempt to improve air quality. Substantial sums have also been allocated to the laying of new expressways and subway tracks.

However, despite the outsized budgets and efforts made towards solving the twin problems of congestion and pollution, the capital city continues to suffer from vehicular gridlock and smoggy air.

The experimental removal of 1.3 million cars from Beijing’s roads is thus an attempt to kill two birds with one stone.

Under the plan, cars with odd and even-numbered plates will be permitted to ply on the roads on alternate days. Violators will be fined. In addition, motorist clubs have been told to voluntarily keep their vehicles off the roads.

To compensate commuters for the measure, public transport services are running longer hours and extra buses and subway trains are being pressed into use.

Emergency vehicles and taxis are exempt from the directive.

During the period of the experiment, the city’s air quality will be monitored at specially set-up stations to test the correlation between air quality and the number of vehicles on the road.

In recent years, Beijing has seen an explosion in car ownership. Rising incomes and cheaper vehicle prices have combined to add almost 1,000 new cars to the roads every day.

The capital is currently home to over 3 million cars.

On Friday, the traffic in Beijing was flowing in a discernibly smoother manner than usual. However, despite the ban, intermittent traffic jams persisted.

The happiest beneficiaries of the move have been the city’s taxi drivers, who are enjoying a glut of customers deprived of the use of their own cars.

Mr. Zhao, who has been a cabbie for over a decade, says he expects his daily income to double over the weekend. Then his smile fades a bit as he adds, “It’s going to be a tiring few days for me.”

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