(BEIJING, April 18) – Beijing is striving to increase rail transportation with an aim to ease up traffic congestion, said Liu Xioaming, deputy director of the Municipal Transportation Commission.

According to the municipal government's decision, a total of 200 kilometers of rail lines will be put in operation before the 2008 Olympic Games, 270 kilometers will be made available in 2010 and 561kilometers are expected to be ready in 2015, when the rail transportation will take up over 50 percent of the public transportation volume, compared with the current level of 20 percent only, he told a press conference at the Beijing Olympic Media Center on Wednesday.

To allay traffic jams in a city now crowded with up to 3 million motor vehicles, the authorities have taken a number of measures including discount bus tickets which should attract more commuters to resort to public transportation, Liu said.

"The number of motor vehicles surpassed one million in 1996 and it took only seven years for the figure to grow to two million and three years to 2.97 million now," said Liu, who added that based on current trends -- 1,060 new vehicles taking to the roads every day --, Beijing will soon be infested with three million vehicles, over five times the volume of Hong Kong's motor vehicles, now standing at 570,000. "We are facing tremendous traffic pressure," Liu said.