For most visitors to a strange city, their first impressions of the place usually involve a rather special stranger who picks them up at the airport, railway station, or bus terminal, and drives them to their hotel - the taxi driver.
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Therefore, in its eager bidding for the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing yesterday asked its thousands of taxi drivers to put more stress on hospitality.
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It is time for all the taxi companies and drivers in the city to pledge high quality service to help visitors feel at home in the ancient city, said Zhang Yansheng, director of the Beijing Transportation Bureau yesterday.
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Some of the specific measures include tutoring local taxi drivers in spoken English, setting higher service standards and improving monitoring processes and equipping each taxi with introductory tapes describing the city and at least one kind of newspaper.
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The goal, Zhang summarized, is to make Beijing taxis safe, comfortable and dependable.
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In addition, Zhang promised to speed up the city's construction of an efficient taxi dispatching and positioning system and help taxis change to cleaner burning liquid natural gas in place of conventional petrol.
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This is an effort to go along with the theme Beijing suggested for the 2008 Olympic Games: emphasizing the advancement of science, the use of new technologies, and environmental protection.
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The executive officials of the International Olympic Committee will come to investigate Beijing in three months.
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(Beijing-2008 11/27/2000)