(Ecns.cn)—The China Communications and Transportation Association announced on Wednesday that "Metro China 2011," a trade show for the urban rail transit industry, will be held at the China International Exhibition Center in Beijing from November 1 to 4.
The association also revealed that by the end of 2010, twelve cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Tianjin, Chongqing, Nanjing, Wuhan, Changchun, Shenzhen, Dalian, Chengdu, and Shenyang had established 48 urban rail transit lines with a total operating mileage of 1395 kilometers.
According to an official at the association, 36 Chinese cities have elaborated on their plans for urban rail transit, among which 28 have been approved by the State Council.
With a construction cost of 500 million yuan per kilometer, an investment of 3.3 trillion yuan will be put into city rail transit from 2009 to 2020. This is an annual average of 270 billion yuan. China is planning to build 96 rail transit lines with a total operating mileage of 2500 kilometers by 2015.
"China is entering a golden time of development for city rail transit construction," said a report in the Beijing Morning Post.
City people stuck on roads
The announcement of the ambitious plan coincides with newly released research, which found that daily urban commuters are suffering.
Due to the rapidly increasing number of cars, commuting for rush hour has become a pain for many Chinese citizens. According to a study released last week by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, residents from 6 cities out of 50 that were analyzed, spend more than 30 minutes in traffic on a daily basis.
The study showed that Beijingers have the longest commutes of any city dwellers in China, spending an average of 38 minutes traveling to and from work on the city's busy roads; while the eastern financial center of Shanghai and the southern economic hub of Guangzhou followed it closely with 36 minutes each.
The three remaining cities are the booming southern city of Shenzhen (35 minutes), eastern China's Jiangsu provincial capital of Nanjing (31 minutes), and southwestern China's Chongqing Municipality (30 minutes).
However, the study has come under fire as many citizens claimed on the internet that they spend much longer than that in traffic.
Last year, the same report found that Beijingers spent an average of 52 minutes commuting to and from work, which also lead the list that year.
Many web users said they were surprised to see that the time is 14 minutes shorter than last year, and thought the actual time should be at least double that.
The report's compilers explained that the calculation method has changed.
An anonymous source working for Professor Niu Wenyuan, who led the project, said that this year's figure does not include the time caused by traffic congestion.
It is an "ideal value" instead of the "absolute value" given last year, said the source, without elaborating on why the compilers decided to change the calculation method.
Not convinced by the explanation, net users in the capital claimed the report was "useless."
"The commuting time calculated under the condition of ‘no traffic jams’ means nothing to us, because we do not live in an 'ideal' world," one web user said on a major news portal.
