Olympic city prepares to test car pollution hurdle

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Beijing, Aug 10: The Chinese capital will hold a test drill for keeping cars off the road during its 2008 Olympic Games, a crucial hurdle for the city beset by pollution and traffic jams, officials announced today.

Between August 17 and 20, about 1.3 million of the city's 3 million vehicles will be ordered off the streets each day depending on whether licence plates end in an odd or even number.

The spokesman for the Beijing environmental protection agency said air quality would be monitored over the four days to test how much of the city's often choking haze disappears.

The drill would ''accumulate experience in ensuring air quality for the Olympic Games period'', spokesman Du Shaozhong said in a news conference broadcast live on the Beijing Games organising committee's Web site (www.beijing2008.cn).

''In 2001 when we won the right to host the Olympic Games we promised that air quality in the Games would be good,'' Du said.

China celebrated the one-year countdown to the Olympics on Wednesday with a series of carefully choreographed ceremonies centred on historic Tiananmen Square.

But vistors' impressions were overshadowed by the cocktail of dust, fumes and smoke that clouded views and left some Olympic officials worried about what the air will be like next year.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge said this week that some competitions might have to be moved if efforts to clean up the city's notoriously smoggy air failed.

The chief of the Australian Olympics effort, John Coates, said athletes from his country had been advised to delay their arrival for the Games because of the dirty air.

''You won't be seeing too many of our athletes until four or five days before their competition,'' he said earlier this week.

But Chinese officials have vowed to clean up what is one of the most polluted cities in the world.

During next week's drill, vehicles will be kept off the road on separate days. The exercise also promises to test the city's strained public transport, under frantic expansion in preparation for the Games.

The vehicle restrictions would add another 2 million journeys to the city's buses and subway every day, Liu Xiaoming, a city traffic official, said in the same news conference.

Rush hour services on buses and the subway will be extended, government staff will turn up at work a half hour earlier than their usual 8:30 start, and shopping malls will delay their opening by an hour to 10 in the morning.

Reuters>