Opinion

Easing traffic

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-18 16:46

It's no exaggeration to say that riding a bicycle is often faster than driving a car in downtown Beijing during the rush hours, when the city's roads are like an enormous parking lot.

The municipal government of Beijing has announced that it is hammering out policies to encourage Beijingers to drive less and working on a contingency plan for dealing with traffic jams. Hopefully, the local government will come up with feasible options to clear the chronic congestion in the city.

There are more than 4.5 million cars on the road in Beijing. Despite the city's efforts to exert greater control over the number of cars coming into the city, 550,000 vehicles flow into the capital from the rest of the nation every day.

It is high time for Beijing to come to grips with the traffic jams that are choking the roads.

As the country gets richer and becomes increasingly urban, more people are buying cars. However, there is lack of awareness among private car buyers about the impact of their actions. While people in large cities in Europe and the United States are prepared to travel using public transport, we love to drive our own cars.

In Beijing, most of the important political, commercial and cultural locations are concentrated in the area within the Fourth Ring Road, which becomes inundated with traffic when people drive their cars to the area rather than traveling by public transport.

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The need to unclog the city's roads has taxed many brains over the years. But the notion that expanding the existing roads or building new ones will cure the problem is misleading; it will simply result in more traffic and more pollution.

As the city grows on an unprecedented scale, it's difficult for the local government to invest in measures that encourage bicycle use, a hallmark of Chinese transportation that's on its way to being forgotten here. So, perhaps the city should turn to other countries for ideas on how to alleviate the problem.

Some countries have introduced a park-and-ride scheme in cities. Large car parks are created on the outskirts of the cities, and people are bussed to city center destinations so as to cut congestion and parking problems. This helps keep a large number of cars away from city centers. Beijing needs to consider providing motorists with viable park-and-ride options that are safe and secure, with easy accesses to freeways and subway stations.

Experts are also smart enough to work out a more reasonable traffic network; fundamental improvements in road and traffic management should be made.

Since Beijing is getting bigger, it is probably unrealistic to expect its residents to ride a bicycle. But, we can make better use of public transport.