Municipal government officials admitted that traffic schemes are not agreeable with the overall layout of Shanghai, home to more than 20 million people.

Due to the conflict between traffic management and city planning, traffic jams remain an everyday headache.

To ease the city's congestion, especially in the downtown areas, the municipal urban transport authority is expected to work out as many as 10 traffic schemes this year to relieve some of the traffic.

"The plans will be brought into line with the city's overall urban development planning to make sure they are efficient and to avoid future traffic jams," said Han Qiang, senior official with the Shanghai Urban Transport Bureau.

Schemes will involve the establishment of subways and taxi stops, improvement of a downtown bus network, construction of traffic terminals and expansion of suburban bus lines.

City government has taken great pains to solve the traffic problems in the past decade with an enormous investment.

Last year the city invested more than 20 billion yuan (US$2.4 billion), one-tenth of its total investment in fixed assets projects, in road and subway projects.

Even though many old streets have been widened, urban elevated roads added, river-crossing tunnels dug and subways built, traffic jams are still a major problem.

According to a report from the city government to the Shanghai People's Congress, vehicles have an average speed of 12.4 kilometers per hour during rush hour in the downtown 17-square-kilometre area. The speed is far from the international standard of 18 kilometers per hour.

Yangpu and Nanpu bridges are saturated with traffic and even the newly-completed Lupu Bridge has exceeded its capacity.

The report also said the city is challenged by a large growth in the number of vehicles. Statistics show vehicle ownership increased by 18 per cent in the first eight months of last year to reach 1.7 million by September.

Although private cars were limited, the number of them still grew by 80 per cent annually in the past two years.

One major problem is that in the existing network, elevated roads downtown are not compatible with the ground roads.

This results in vehicles on the elevated roads crowding the outlets and can't get onto the ground roads smoothly.

Han noted that improved traffic is needed soon and asked the city's urban planning authority to give it first priority.

After Shanghai won the bid for the World Expo 2010 in 2002, the transport bureau started work on the schemes.

Currently, the city has 18,000 buses with 60 per cent running in the 600-square-kilometre downtown area.

The city has planned to build three satellite cities in Jiading, Lingang, Nanhui and Songjiang districts after several years of effort, with each having a population of 1 million. The downtown population will be reduced from 9.7 million to 8.1 million.

The city now invests more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) yearly in building subways to form an urban track network to be completed by 2007, the report said.

According to Han, this year the bureau plans to build 36 traffic terminals, where people can change buses, subways and taxis.

It will also complete a citywide taxi network by 2005 that will contain 1,000 taxi terminals. Taxis will be able to be called by phone.

"The network will help reduce the vacant taxis driving around," he said, adding that at present, nearly half of the city's 48,000 taxis are idle on the roads.

This year, the city will spend another 20 billion yuan (US$2.4 billion) building traffic facilities.

(China Daily January 21, 2004)