Traffic ban fails to beat city smog

Beijing officials forced 1.3 million cars off the city streets yesterday, but I still ended up in a traffic jam.

With a year to go before the Olympics and 1,200 new cars on the roads of the capital every day, bureaucrats are experimenting with ways of freeing the city’s chronic gridlock. Cars with even-number licence plates were banned yesterday and will be again tomorrow; today and Monday they have the run of the roads as vehicles with odd-numbered plates are forced to stay at home.

With taxis and military cars exempt, the four-day experiment puts a third of Beijing’s 3 million cars out of action. The results were varied.

Traffic in the preweekend rush hour flowed more swiftly than usual. Maybe the tooting of horns by drivers trying to gain an inch here or there was less frenetic. But I was still stationary for more than ten minutes during an 8km (5 mile) journey that took me half an hour – not bad for getting home on a Friday evening.
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