Intelligent Transport

Beijing is using the latest information and communications technologies to streamline the city's traffic

The National Day parade marking the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China happened on Beijing's central Tiananmen Square on October 1. The event drew an audience of more than 200,000 people and nearly 200,000 participants, who all needed to be dispersed within three and a half hours after the ceremony. The event posed an unprecedented challenge to the city's traffic control system.

But a newly adopted intelligent transportation system (ITS), which uses information and communications technologies to manage infrastructure and vehicles, helped the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau complete its daunting mission.

The bureau mobilized 7,000 traffic police officers and 6,000 traffic coordinators to work throughout the city that day, all of whom were equipped with global positioning system receivers, said Sui Yagang, vice director of the bureau. The tool enabled data and video communications between the bureau's command center and parade organizers.

The command center, put into operation on April 28, 2007, possesses the largest and most advanced ITS in the world. It is equipped with 22 live monitoring systems that provide traffic videos and information on signals and the flow of vehicles. The system, which covers the whole city and operates around the clock, also monitors accidents and immediately reports them to the police.

The parade and colorfully decorated Tiananmen Square made Beijing a popular tourist destination during the one-week National Day holiday. The city received 14.97 million visitors during the holiday, up 59 percent year on year, according to statistics from the Beijing Tourism Administration.