Driving speed in Beijing may be only 15 km in 2015

With the present growth rate, motor vehicles in Beijing will reach 7 million in 2015 and it is estimated that the average driving speed will slow to only 15 kilometers per hour, which is only equivalent to a person running at a middle speed, according to Beijing Transportation Research Center.

Although this is only an estimated result based on some figures, it will become a reality if no measures are carried out. As Beijing saw runaway growth in both population and autos, traffic in the city has become a widespread concern in the past five years.

During the first half of 2010, the number of autos in Beijing saw an average daily net increase of 1,900 and a total increase of nearly 350,000, which is equivalent to the total number in Shi Jiazhuang, capital of Hebei province. Currently, nearly 4.5 million autos run on the roads in Beijing.

The rapid growth of motor vehicles and the intensifying traffic congestion has been a persistent problem. In the year 2002, Beijing witnessed serious traffic jams and the number of autos reached 1.8 million in the middle of that year. The media reported that the figure was the limit and Beijing would not bear more vehicles running on the roads.

But Beijing has long broken the limit of 1.8 million. By taking steps such as improving road infrastructure, developing public transport and enhancing the management level of traffic intelligence, Beijing's traffic situation has not worsened.

It took three years and nine months for the number of Beijing's autos to increase from 2 million to 3 million and another two years and seven months to reach 4 million. In contrast, it took 12 years for the number of Tokyo's vehicles to increase from 3 million to 4 million. In 2009, Beijing's autos saw a net increase of 515,000, almost equivalent to the total number of Hong Kong's.

Compared with Tokyo and other international metropolises, Beijing is not only growing faster in the number of autos, but also the car use intensity is much higher. The average yearly mileage of the cars in Beijing stands at 15,000 kilometers, 1.5 times higher than that of London and twice that of Tokyo.

About 40 percent of the cars in Beijing are driven less than 5 kilometers per trip on average in a year, which means they can be replaced by bikes or other public transportation vehicles, according to Guo Jifu, director of Beijing Transportation Research Center.

More than 80 percent of autos are concentrated in urban areas within Beijing's six ring roads, and the number of cars owned by the residents of the city proper is 1.8 times higher than their counterparts in Paris, and 2.3 times in New York.

High growth rate, high use density and high concentration caused the severe traffic situation in Beijing. Although it implemented some measures to ease congestion, these three conditions have all but nullified the effect.

According to the plan, even if Beijing's road infrastructure achieves an ideal state, it can only accommodate 6.7 million autos. But the road infrastructure cannot possibly reach this state by 2015, when the number of cars in the city will reach 7.5 million and the driving speed slows to only 15 kilometers per hour.

In view of this situation, many experts said Beijing should guide the use of cars by economic methods, such as raising the parking fees in the urban areas to let people reduce their use of cars.

The city has also put forth plans that set a goal for the three forms of environmentally-friendly transit — rail transportation, public ground transportation and bicycles — to account for 65 percent of all transportation by 2015.

By Liang Jun, People's Daily Online