Road traffic and how to fix it - the headache of the modern city - will be a major discussion point at the 14th World Congress on the Intelligent Transport System (ITS), which kicked off in Beijing yesterday.

The five-day conference, sponsored by the Ministry of Science and Technology and Beijing municipal government, has attracted more than 2,000 foreign experts from more than 50 countries.

More than 140 enterprises from home and abroad have established exhibition booths to demonstrate their development achievements and roughly 200 technological forums will be held during the conference.

China started its ITS research from the 1970s and built its highway monitoring system and urban traffic management system in the 1990s.

Thanks to hi-tech measures such as GPS and Electronic Data Interchange technologies, 10 cities including Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen have launched comprehensive traffic management systems and become ITS model cities.

"The host city of the 2008 Olympics, Beijing will grasp the opportunity to use world expertise to upgrade its traffic management potential to help solve its traffic congestion problem," Beijing Mayor Wang Qishan, said.

(China Daily October 10, 2007)