Press conference on the operation of public traffic and safeguards during the Games

Ladies and Gentlemen, friends of the Media, Good Morning. Welcome to today's press conference. The theme of this press conference is about the public transportation guarantees of Beijing since the star of the Games. Today is the sixth day after the start of the Beijing Olympic Games, over the past five days the city has been running smoothly. And the speaker of the day is Mr. Zhou Zhengyu, Deputy Director and spokesperson of the Beijing Municipal Committee of Communications

2008-08-13 12:01:15

Good morning friends from the media! This is my sixth time here and I can still see so many journalists here who have keen interest in public transport guarantees.

2008-08-13 12:03:33

Today the public transport guarantees have been operating in Games time and now we are in the third phase. Staring on the first of July there was a period of traffic control and over the past one month we can see that this measure has been effective and the traffic is operated in an orderly way and the public is quite used to it; and second phase is the public transport during the opening ceremony on the eighth of August and that was a success and today we are in the third phase, that is, Games time public transport management from the formal start of the event.

2008-08-13 12:05:58

It has been the fifth day today. And the guarantees for Games time have also been orderly and smooth by far in terms of roads and the traffic surrounding the sports venues and the transport for spectators. We can say that everything is smooth and normal.

2008-08-13 12:07:01

After the opening ceremony, on ninth I was here briefing you on the progress we have made. One word is best to describe what we have achieved and that is "smooth" and at the opening ceremony we saw the character "harmony" in Chinese and our public transport management is smooth. This is an exact description of the current situations. In as short of 25 minutes all the spectators left the stadium, 15 minutes ahead of what we had planned.

2008-08-13 12:09:27

And our plan was a thoughtful one. l on that day was among the first batch of people to leave the place; people left the place in three sequences. First is the VIPs and second batch should be athletes who numbered more than 10,000 and the VIPs only used 27 minutes and the athletes left the place and went back to the Olympic village in as short of 50 minutes and the other spectators left the place in as short as 75 minutes and that day the Beijing subway including the airport express line was open 24 hours non-stop and therefore it took as long as 45 hours for the public transport from August the eighth to the ninth and the transport for spectators entering and leaving the stadium, according to our estimate, 95% took public transport including the busses and subway lines which was a record in the use of public transport.

2008-08-13 12:10:54

Usually the proportion of travel using in public transport is only 35 % and after the traffic control this proportion rises to 45%, up about 10% due to the traffic control measures. And some people diverted from private transport to public transport.

2008-08-13 12:12:53

And the opening ceremony public transport organization was a quite special one. Over the days our priority has been to ensure the traffic during Games time and our priority among this is the departure services after the end of the Games and some events and priority areas -- the basketball hall -- the last event of basketball match is 10:50 PM or even after 12 midnight -- so the departure service an important task and in the future tennis matches, swimming and other kinds of sports will also last until 11 or 12 PM or even later.

2008-08-13 12:14:52

We have all made thoughtful and careful arrangements and preparations in this regard. According to the schedule of the sports and events, we aim to ensure that no matter how late it is, people will have public transport to use and the subway during Games time is open till one o'clock in the early morning because we fully take into account the departure of spectators who watch evening events. Yesterday our subway handled 4.1 million people throughout the whole network, which was a new figure. Line 5 had a record high of 710,000 people and line 10 handled a total number of 550,000 people which was also a peak figure of that line.

2008-08-13 12:16:50

All of this shows that among public transport, track transport is increasingly becoming a role of being the main force to handle traffic flows and track transport, after a renovation or a repair of the trains, is now attracting more and more passengers. There are more choices in changing different lines; changing the different lines is becoming more convenient, comfortable and less crowded. In terms of traffic flow, the increase in the flow also shows the advantage of track transportation -- that is about the situation over the past few days.

2008-08-13 12:18:01

Thank you, Mr. Zhou. Now he's ready to take questions.

2008-08-13 12:19:15

This question has been raised in some previous press conferences too. I'll make two points: First, this arrangement was decided by the Beijing Municipal Government. It is a temporary measure for the period between July 20 and September 20. So far we have no plans to make any change to this regulation.

2008-08-13 12:21:56

It has been more than 20 days since we implemented the regulation. I have learned that people are quite echoing what you have just said. They believed that this regulation has contributed to better air quality in Beijing. A cut of 1.8-2 million vehicles on the road has helped to reduce daily emissions by at least 20%. As to how people are getting used to the regulation, many car owners complained about the inconvenience in the beginning, but they're quite used to driving cars one day and taking public transport or riding bicycles the next day. Some even walk, which is a healthy way of living. So I think there have been some changes in the way the Beijing residents will live their lives.

2008-08-13 12:23:34

We hope the measures we have adopted to ensure smooth transportation service during the Olympic Games will deliver as many positive things as possible. The government is giving top priority to improving public transport and encouraging people to do more green ways of travel. I believe that the "green ways" of transport will become more popular with citizens.

2008-08-13 12:24:37

The Beijing transport system has been facing enormous challenges in recent years that is mainly because we are seeing increased demand and need for public transport in Beijing. We are thinking about addressing problems in transport system by stages as we have been addressing the air quality problem in Beijing. We have been addressing the air quality problem in Beijing through ten stages of measures, now the number of blue sky days in Beijing has been increased. We have tried to address this air quality problem in Beijing by root measures. We have cut down on coal use, removed polluting plants in surrounding areas, and raised criteria of polluting vehicles in Beijing.

2008-08-13 12:28:25

We have achieved very noticeable results in terms of transport system bottlenecks. We have been seeing in recent years three rapid rises -- the rises of population in Beijing, the spread of construction areas in Beijing at 50 million square meters every year, and the vehicles increase by 300,000 every year and recently hitting 33 million in Beijing. All these have put mounting pressure on transport system in Beijing.

2008-08-13 12:30:34

Secondly I think the bottlenecks have something to do with cars or other vehicles. For each car to travel it needs firstly a parking space in its original place and then its destination is another place of land for parking and during its travel it needs the roads to support it so that means it has raised a lot of demands in terms of need for development by municipal government, including the road space.

2008-08-13 13:32:33

Thirdly it has something to do with the features of transportation itself. In each day we will have two peak hours early in the day and late when people all get off work in afternoon and that will both lead to some traffic jams. We have peak hours in the morning which lasting about 4 hours and three hours in afternoon, that is from Monday through Friday. But some other places may only have some peak hours during a small number of days or weekends through the year for instance the Fragrance Mountain will only get its traffic in spring time when people all go to the mountain to see the reddening leaves.

2008-08-13 13:34:19

For the rest of the year the roads and the traffics are quite smooth and now there are about three thousand parking spots in the Fragrance Mountain area. I think all these reasons have contributed to the transportation, which becoming a global headache for all these metropolises.

As I have also found that when I talk to my colleagues from other countries and regions they all share the same headache. So if you say that what measures do we have in mind for the future development of Beijing transport system we think we are going to give top priority to the public transport in Beijing.

2008-08-13 13:36:37

We encourage the Beijing citizens to use public transport as much as possible during the two peak periods on an average working day. And with our policy of giving top priority to public transport, we will place our efforts mainly on developing the track-based public transport means. Now the track lines of public transport have eight lines. We plan by 2015, will have 1l lines and extend the total length to 561 kilometers.

2008-08-13 13:38:35

Our plan is that there are at least two appeals in the future public transport system in Beijing: We need to make much progress in terms of capacity and volume the public transport system can carry. And secondly we need to make the fare level more attractive. We hope these measures can help attract more and more people to use public transport in particular the track based public transport to make their travels. Our number one goal in developing the public transport system is to raise the current ratio of using public transport from 35% to 45%.

So the current fare level in Beijing's metro system is acted as part of our transport system developing strategy. It is not a stopgap measure during Olympics or Paralympics.

Next question.

2008-08-13 13:40:21

We have two priorities during Games time: first is the departure service after spectators finish watching Games in the evening and we focus on two fronts: one is that the whole network will be extend and we follow the principle of the longest distance – which means, for example, we need to ensure that if Line One finishes at one o'clock then Batong Line will be at 1:30 in the early morning so that all the spectators will get to their destinations, especially those whose destinations is farther have trains to catch to go home.

2008-08-13 13:45:24

So that we make sure that everyone can have public transport to go home with and in terms of public bus or other transport. This means we have deployed designated or dedicated special buses according to schedule of Games. In particular, we'll make sure that when spectators leave stadiums they'll have enough buses to leave the space.

2008-08-13 13:46:38

And third we will also, through the public transport station and also management and control center, divert some other vehicles to the surrounding areas of the sport venues which are not under traffic control. And our second priority is of course the central area of Bird's Nest because the track and field events will take place at the fifteenth of this month and at that time there will be 180,000-200,000 people surrounding that area everyday. And the peak day will be on the 23rd of August and the number of people at the central area will reach 206,000 and that number will succeed the number of people at the opening ceremony.

2008-08-13 13:47:24

However, according to our estimate, the pressure on public transport will be lighter than that on the day of the open ceremony because the events will take place on the morning, during noon, and during evening separately. Anyway we are fully prepared; we will make every effort to ensure the traffic for the large number of spectators. And on the use of dedicated lanes, the ninth of August was the first day after the opening ceremony and now there are only 16 sports venues being used and in the next few days we will see an increase in the number of sports venues being used because on the fifteenth of August the Bird's Nest will started to be used and as for the use of dedicated lanes – a number of shuttle buses for athletes and other supporting vehicles are using it.

2008-08-13 13:49:40

As far as we are concerned, the arrangement of setting aside these dedicated lanes is crucial to the success of the Games. For a specific team to participate in Games, it requires trainings and some of the trainings may take place at thirty separate venues and training centers. The team will go through a process of training, preliminary competitions, group competitions, semifinal or even final competitions, therefore they have to travel to and from the place that they live and the places where they are going to have their competitions and therefore the dedicated lanes are, I should say, the most important measures to ensure that they can follow schedules well in terms of transport. And from what happened during past few days we can also see that citizens' understand our efforts and support our efforts and there were few violations of this effort.

2008-08-13 13:51:16

I think your question concerns the use of pinyin when translating the names of places. Beijing has carried out some standardization work to unify the use of pinyin for the names of places, roads and bus stops. That comes to the question of how to put Chinese names of places in English. Actually the English version of many places in Beijing just adopts pinyin, for example, "Xidan zhan" is "Xidan station" in English. Whenever possible, we use English to express the exact meaning of a place. However in most cases we use pinyin directly. We welcome good opinions or suggestions from citizens and tourists, and we will give careful and positive considerations to their questions.

2008-08-13 13:55:12

That station is a temporary one. We'll go to check it and make adjustment immediately if it is true.

2008-08-13 13:58:25

It's time now to finish the press conference. Thanks for coming.

2008-08-13 13:59:11