The capital city is conjuring up a vision of a complete metro network that may help alleviate heavy traffic pressures on the roads.

The Beijing Municipal Commission of Transportation is planning to build more rails, Xinhua News Agency reported.

A new subway loop line is among the proposals.

Currently, the capital has only one loop subway in the core of the city.

Since the Batong Line, a light rail line along the north of the city, started operation at the end of last year, Beijing now has a 114-kilometre rail network that can transport 1.55 million passengers per day.

According to Xinhua, the rail development plans call for 16 subway lines, six light rail lines and six suburban railways.

Among the 16 subway lines, two would connect to set up another loop that would run under the Zhongguancun High-tech Park, the central business district and the Olympic Park, where a new Beijing city center is taking shape.

As preparations for the Beijing Olympic Games get into high gear, infrastructure construction will start to develop fast, especially transportation infrastructure which has been under great traffic pressure for a long time.

The number of vehicles in the city has risen sharply in recent years. Statistics show there are at least 2.2 million vehicles on Beijing's roads every day, almost four times the 564,000 vehicles in 1993, when cars were still a luxury for most citizens.

The soaring number of cars has outstripped the speed of road expansion.

This year, the municipal government plans to invest more than 30 billion yuan (US$3.6 billion) in the "New Beijing Transportation System" to relieve traffic.

More roads and subways are planned both on and under ground with construction sites dotting the landscape.

Subway lines 4, 5 and 10 as well as an Olympic branch line, all under construction now, are expected to open to traffic by 2008.

When completed, the total length of rails of the city will reach about 300 kilometers, forming the preliminary framework of a metro network.

However, there are still some concerns about the load-bearing capacity of the city's transportation system in the long run.

The programme to build more metro rails in the future may alleviate traffic pressures on the ground.

Beijing has more than 14 million residents while more than 17 million people stay in the city every day. The population of the city is still increasing at an annual rate of 2.5 percent.

Sources with the Beijing Municipal Commission of Development and Reform said the capital is trying to bring the growth rate under 1.5 percent in the next few years.

(China Daily November 2, 2004)