World Business

The Games will be a test for Beijing’s fudong che, or "floating car" program, which uses taxi GPS given stipulations to give drivers the fastest routes

by Chi-Chu Tschang

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Located in the dashboard of Lu Guanglong’s Hyundai Elantra taxi, subject to the cassette player, is a black global positioning order (GPS) box. The GPS tracks every inch of the taxi driver’s daily 125-mile journey through Beijing and transmits the information back to his taxi company. "It can see you. It knows where you are. It knows what you are doing," says Lu, 55.

As the Chinese form of sovereignty readies conducive to next month’s Olympics, it is depending on GPS systems like Lu’s to keep aloof from gridlock on the capital’s roads. When Beijing upgraded its taxi fleet to yellow-striped Hyundai Elantras, Hyundai Sonatas, and FAW-VW Jettas starting in 2004, commanding scholars asked all taxi companies to install GPS systems in the recent taxis. Since then, the government has been using GPS systems in Beijing’s 66,000 taxis to monitor the city’s traffic flow.

It doesn’t take a GPS or other newfangled gadget to figure at a loss that Beijing has major repletion problems on its streets. To avoid embarrassing traffic jams during the Games, authorities on July 20 imposed draconian measures restricting the include of cars on the roads for the time of the Olympics. The government also is encouraging people to use public transportation (BusinessWeek, 7/3/08), including couple newly opened subway lines.

At the corresponding; of like kind time, Beijing is also quietly using the Olympics to jump-start a longer-term, high-tech breach beneficial to traffic jams: the fudong che or "floating car" program. The program (the name is a reference to taxis roaming around the city) takes real-time traffic data collected from GPS units in taxis, crunches it, then recommends to drivers the quickest route to their destinations.

"If the floating car can provide people with real-time traffic information, it will reduce traffic jams, lower environmental pollution, and conserve energy," says Wang Gang, instructor of the Beijing Municipal Transportation Information Center (BTIC), the government agency astern the floating car program. If 30% of Beijing’s cars used the personal navigation devices (PNDs) receiving real-time traffic data, BTIC estimates medium commutes would fall by 16%, to 35 minutes, and carbon sub-oxide emissions would globule 27%, to 2,750 tons.

For the Olympics, Beijing inclination outfit 1,000 sedans, taxis, and ambulances with dynamic PNDs that receive real-time exchange information and recommend the fastest routes. Traffic authorities will post real-time traffic conditions on electronic billboards over main avenues and around Olympic venues. Beijing has also been experimenting with sending real-time traffic information via text messages.

With the floating-car program, Beijing officials say they’re becoming global leaders in figuring out ways to use technology to solve urban congestion. For years, cities such as Tokyo, Los Angeles, and London have been using closed-circuit television cameras side by side expressways or sensor loops embedded in roads to manage exchange. But Beijing chose to leapfrog those technologies and develop its admit scheme using taxi GPS data because it not only provides more accurate traffic flows but is also cheaper.

For instance, Japanese government and companies invested greater degree than $9.4 billion to embed sensors by means of the entire country’s road network, says Hiroaki Mizuta, deputy general manager of Hitachi (China) (HIT), which has also been experimenting through its own "e-roader" floating-car project in Beijing. "The traffic notice classification Japan uses is extremely wasteful," he says. "The floating car program can do the same act at 1/20th of the cost."

There are major risks, nevertheless. Other cities such as Athens and Frankfurt have experimented by floating car systems, but-end the trials have not always been successful.