Beijing¡¯s four-day traffic control experiment

It was done specifically for the Olympics but the four-day trial in which more than one million cars were banned from Beijing’s roads has shown a way ahead.

He Bin, a lawyer living on the outskirts of Beijing, said, ‘I would like to leave my car in the garage forever if the traffic is as smooth as it was during those four days. It usually takes an hour and 20 minutes to drive to my office, but the bus trip saved me half an hour. I listened to music and read newspapers on the bus.’

Most Internet users hailed the temporary ban as a success. ‘The ban has taken Beijing back to the 1980s when there were no traffic jams. I hope the ban will never be lifted’ wrote one netizen at an online forum of Sina.com.

About 1.3 million cars were removed from the city roads each day on August 17-20 to test the effect on air quality for the Olympic Games.

Drivers with even-numbered license plates, excluding taxis, buses and emergency vehicles, were banned Friday and Sunday. Odd-numbered cars were banned on Saturday and Monday.

The air pollution index was between 93 and 95, down from 116. That is still an unacceptably high figure but it is heading in the right direction.

However, very few people voluntarily give up driving their cars. This problem has been studied all over the world and there is evidence that even in bad traffic drivers see their cars as a protective cocoon from the pressures of office, home and other people. It is their space for an hour or so.

And car drivers, by and large, fight against abandoning their private space.

An editorial in the Beijing News said the temporary traffic ban could solve Beijing’s traffic woes during a specific time period, but there remains conflicts of interests if the ban is put into force permanently.

The editorial argued that car owners already pay several kinds of fares to drive their cars so if their rights have to be sacrificed for Beijing’s blue sky, they deserve compensation from the government.

An alternative argument could be that if they do not need cars they can sell them and save the money for themselves. Owning and running a car is not a cheap hobby.

Xie Shaodong, deputy head of the Environmental Sciences and Engineering College of Peking University, believes Beijing cannot cure its pollution troubles by simply restricting cars.

Xie Shaodong said, ‘In the long run, building a fast and accessible transportation network will be a more effective way to improving Beijing’s air quality.’

Which is a sort of self-fulfilling argument. There is a fast and accessible transportation network being built and the problem is to get drivers out of their cars and on to public transportation.

Beijing will build eight new subways ahead of 2012, bringing the number of subway lines to 14, totaling 407 kilometers.
Bicycles were more in evidence on the streets over the four days of the test and a Beijing company plans to make 50,000 bikes available for rent at 230 outlets around the city before the Olympics.