After allowing cars free rein in Beijing for years, authorities have been trying to ease the city's increasingly congested streets with an enormous rail expansion ahead of next month's Olympics.

"These new rail lines are great. There are no more traffic jams for me," said Liu Nan, who commutes 27 kilometres from north to south of the city every day on the recently opened subway line number five.

A journey for Liu that used to take 90 minutes using two buses and two subway lines now takes almost half the time on one train only.

Just as Beijing commuters are looking for a way out from rising petrol prices and daily traffic gridlock, Beijing city planners are coming up with a solution and many key planks are set to start just days ahead of the Olympics.

From Sunday three new rail links will open, increasing the number of lines to eight and the length of track to 200 kilometres from the current 142.

One of the lines runs out to Beijing Capital Airport's massive new terminal three designed by British architect Norman Foster and a key Olympic infrastructure addition to the city.

Instead of having to deal with the often bumper-to-bumper traffic on the "expressway" to and from the airport that can sometimes see passengers stuck in a taxi for two hours, the 28-kilometre train journey will take just 20 minutes.

Another line, known as the Olympic spur, will carry fans straight to the main Olympic stadium. Another, line 10, runs along a right angle, from west to east and then north to south.

One more important piece in Beijing's transportation jigsaw puzzle is the new South Station, a mega-project the size of 20 football fields.

That will open on August 1, just seven days before the Olympic opening ceremony.

A train service with a top speed of 350 kilometres an hour will run from the South Station to the port city of Tianjin about 115 kilometres away.

That train will allow fans going to Tianjin to watch Olympic football events to get there in just 30 minutes, while allowing people living in those two cities to commute daily.

Modernisation of Beijing's transport sector has been a long-neglected priority.

1000 new cars a day hitting the road

With only just over 100 kilometres of subway lines for 16 million residents in 2003, Beijing's transport infrastructure was beginning to hold the fast-developing city back and commuters had little choice but to rely on crowded buses, cycling or private cars.

Now the number of cars has topped three million and is rising at an unsustainable rate of more than 1000 a day. Traffic logjams rank alongside pollution that is partly caused by the cars as some Beijing's worst features.

According to Chinese economist Mao Yushi, direct economic losses attributable to traffic gridlock stands at ¥6-billion ($900-million) a year.

After Beijing won the right to host the Olympics in 2001, officials drew up a five-year investment plan worth ¥83.8-billion, more than five percent of the city's GDP, to upgrade the city's transportation sector.

"This kind of investment has been rarely seen in the world. But even that scale of funding did not really have a major effect of easing road congestion," said Wang Jun, an urbanisation specialist in his latest book called "Cities in my Notebook."

The city government is playing catch-up after years of neglect, admitted Tan Xuxiang, deputy director of the city's planning department.

"It is a real pity that work on expanding the metro took so long," he said.

"Cars have taken over the city and we are finally deploying the resources to play catch up.

"We cannot stop people buying cars, but we can persuade them to use public transport by putting in place a good system."

Tan said that in total the city was working on 10 new subway lines and would have a mass transit rail system fitting for a world capital by 2020.

AFP