And you thought Bangalore was bad

“Beijing isn’t a city, it’s the world’s biggest parking lot,” says Li Yueming, a Beijing resident, only half in jest. “I spend nearly three hours almost everyday in stop-go traffic, and it’s taking the joy out of driving my first car.”

Li’s frustration is widely shared in Beijing — and, indeed, in cities across China that are groaning under the weight of an explosion in automobile ownership and horrendously gridlocked roads. In one of the most extreme cases in August last year, an expressway from Beijing in Hebei province, witnessed a 100-km traffic jam, the world’s longest, with trucks bearing goods and coal stuck on the road for more than 10 days.

Also last year, Beijing earned the dubious honour of topping IBM’s global “commuter pain index”, scoring 99 on a 100-point rating scale, along with Mexico City. The city has 4.7 million registered cars, up from 2.6 million in 2005, and an average of 2,000 new cars hit the roads everyday.

Urban transportation authorities in China’s sprawling capital city, which is home to 20 million residents, are scratching their heads for solutions to ease the congestion: Some of the more over-the-top ideas envisage space-age, giant ‘super-buses’ that will straddle the road, run on rails with cars whooshing beneath it and seat up to 1,400 passengers in an elevated chamber.

Other, more down-to-earth ideas include blasting tunnels beneath the most congested districts of the capital and building huge underground roads — and limiting the number of new cars that will join Beijing’s bumper-to-bumper traffic at 240,000 for 2011.

Municipal authorities are even drawing on China’s history of having been the “Bicycle Kingdom”, and are considering a “bicycle-sharing system” to get more people out of their cars and start pedalling.

Traditional solutions, such as building more roads, may not be enough to overcome the growth of traffic in rapidly developing cities, and multiple solutions need to be deployed simultaneously to avoid a failure of the transportation networks, notes Naveen Lamba, IBM’s global industry lead for intelligent transportation.

A quota system?
But each of the solutions proposed for Beijing faces formidable obstacles: For instance, under the new ‘quota’ system for Beijing car licences, only one in 12 drivers who apply will qualify in a lottery, given the rush of applications. A driver may register only one car, and individuals can apply once a month; unsuccessful applications will be carried forward to the next month’s draw of lots for a licence.

Auto industry associations are sceptical that short-term policies will east the congestion. Local media reports note that auto-dealers have been forging invoices — by back-dating them — to get around the licensing restrictions.

International transportation experts also doubt the commercial viability of the futuristic ‘super-bus’ idea. “As with any novel technology, there is a bit of hype, and an expectation that it will change the future of transportation,” notes Alok Jain, head of India operations at MVA Asia, a leading traffic and transportation consultancy. “But the sceptical view is that unless you have a prototype, it’s difficult to make a judgment.” In particular, he points to operational issues — such as safety and cost considerations — that remain unaddressed.

Even the bicycle rental idea, which offers the additional incentive that it could help reduce the high air pollution levels, has elements of uncertainty associated with it. The proposal cannot be run commercially, and must be subsidised by the government. And Beijing’s road system design, which has over the years become geared towards motor vehicles rather than bicycles, makes it borderline dangerous for cyclists. Then there’s the risk of bicycle theft: It’s famously said that you can’t consider yourself a Beijinger unless you’ve lost three bikes.

Experts point out that even the extensive inter-city network of high-speed railway that China is rolling out won’t help ease congestion when millions of migrant workers return home early next month during the Chinese New Year holiday season. That’s because fares on the high-speed trains remain out of reach of most low-income-earning migrant workers, who prefer to take the slower trains (on which fares are cheaper) or even long-distance buses.

China’s ministry of transport estimates that 2.6 billion bus passenger trips will be made between January 19 and February 27 this year, the peak travel season. To cater to that rush, a fleet of 840,000 buses will hit the road, making 2.4 million road trips a day, according to ministry spokesman He Jianzhong.

That image — of millions of workers on the road — will make for arresting images and clever headlines about a China ‘on the move’. But it will also make for hellish driving conditions on China’s gridlocked roads.