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Toh Han Shih

The mainland plans to build the world's biggest urban rail network as it battles to get people off increasingly traffic-snarled roads in its major cities and onto public transport.
 Beijing has accelerated an already aggressive plan to build thousands of kilometres of rail lines in the nation's expanding cities to cope with worsening traffic congestion. 
China is already second only to the United States in terms of the size of its urban metro rail network, but will become the biggest by 2012. 
It is building 500km of urban metro rail lines every year.  
Currently, 25 cities across the country have been given the green light to build metro rail networks. 
It is expected that 87 metro rail lines with a total length of 2,495km will be built by 2015,  according to the China Railway Construction Corp (CRCC),  a leading Chinese rail construction firm listed in Shanghai and Hong Kong. 
That is a more ambitious rollout than previously planned,  in which 15cities would construct 1,700km of urban rail network track by 2015 with an investment of more than 600 billion yuan (HK$683.88 billion).
Li Guoyong,  deputy head of industrials at the National Development and Reform Commission  (NDRC), yesterday told Bloomberg that the mainland will spend more than  one trillion yuan to increase the length of its urban metro rail networks from 940km at the end of 2009 to more than 3,000km by 2015. That compares with China's investment in urban metro railway from 1995 to 2008 of about 140 billion yuan, according to Beijing Huaxinjie Investment (BHI) Consulting,  a transport consultancy firm.
Road networks across increasingly crowded coastal cities cannot cope with increasing traffic,  Chen Jing,  BHI's sales manager, said. Since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the capital has implemented restrictions on cars yet traffic congestion is worsening, Chen said. 
Continued economic growth means the cost of a small car will soon be within  reach of millions of people in regional cities across the country. Consumer finance options will make cars even more affordable.
Major cities are already feeling the impact of soaring car ownership among the middle class. A Beijing consultant said that since 2002 the number of cars in the city had soared from two million to over four million. 
'China is undergoing very fast urbanisation and to control traffic congestion it needs to build subways,' the consultant said. 
'The government wants to increase the public transit percentage of total travel within cities.'
The government also wants to encourage green transport like metro rail instead of people driving polluting cars. Between now and 2015,  Beijing's  official plan is to spend 35 billion yuan each year to expand its metro system from 230km to 561km.
The Ministry of Railways and Sichuan province signed an agreement this week to push the construction of a metro railway in the provincial capital Chengdu. In the next five years, Shanghai will build 200km of urban metro railway, in addition to its 400km of operational metro rail lines, Xinhua reported.
Fast track
The length of urban metro railway lines China is building every year, in kilometres, is: 500



Beijing speeds up metro rail plan across 25 cities