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Beijing is expected to have 5 million automobiles by 2020, which means nearly every family has its own car, according to a 57-page Beijing Transport Development Compendium.
The compendium, issued by Beijing Municipal Government, gave a specific blueprint on Beijing's transport development in the coming 15 years.
According to the compendium, the number of automobile in Beijing amounted to the current 2.35 million from 564,000 for 1993 and the figure would exceed 3.8 million by 2010 and 5 million by 2020.
Faced up to the coming overburden traffic, the Beijing Municipal Government is planning to build more highways and roads, encourage citizens to take bus and subway and construct more parking lots, according to the compendium.
From 1993 to 2003, Beijing Municipal Government spent more than 140 billion yuan for transportation infrastructure construction, taking up to 5.3 percent of the then city's GDP total.
However, more than 80 percent of the investment was input into the downtown transportation infrastructure, leaving the transportation facilities in suburbs still backward. Therefore, the compendium is aiming to optimize the city transportation construction patterns.
According to the compendium, six highways from south to north will be built to link ring roads, so as to relieve the current traffic jams. And more subways and bus lines will reach to the city's suburbs, such as Tongzhou district.
Expanding the scale of public transport is another major objective included by the compendium. By 2010, bus passengers will take no more than eight minutes to find a bus station in downtown and no stop-to-stop transfer will exceed a distance of 300 meters.
Thirteen super parking lots will be built at the neighboring areas of the fifth ring roads for citizens living at suburbs to park cars there and then take bus or subway into downtown.
(Xinhua News Agency June 13, 2005)
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