Zhang Xiaodong, director of transport at the Olympics, told a session  of the 14th World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS)  in Beijing that nearly 16,000 drivers and service personnel will keep more than 10,000 official Olympics vehicles running smoothly.

Nearly half of the 10,000 vehicles, all equipped with wireless communication devices, will exclusively serve Games events, while 2,200 shuttles and sponsors’ buses, as well as almost 2,000 rental vehicles, will be available for the Olympic community at large.

He said, ‘An integrated traffic control center with a transport operation center, seven sub-centers, and car teams set up by the Olympics transit stops and venues is to be formed.’

A similar three-layered, real-time command-and-control system will be adopted to monitor all Olympic venues, lanes and locations on a 24/7 basis.

Considerable challenges, however, remain. Nearly 5,000 members of the International Olympics Committee (IOC) and VIPs, over 12,000 athletes and team officials, 3,000 technical officials, more than 21,600 accredited media professionals, nearly 400,000 sponsors and guests, and over 100,000 staff are expected to attend the Games. They all have to be transported.

Beijing has initiated a series of drastic moves to encourage transit usage most of which involve moving people out of cars and on to subways. All the signs are it will very possibly work as planned with the odd hiccup here and there.
Source: People’s Daily Online

Beijing will use Nissan’s still-in-development transportation safety system for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. According to The Wall Street Journal, the system, which is called Star Wings, will rely on an existing Beijing system to collect traffic data, which Nissan will then turn around and transmit to drivers via an unspecified wireless network.

It will allow drivers to determine the quickest route to take which, in theory, should reduce congestion in the city and, as the latest statistics on navigation systems show, make the drive a lot safer.

Nissan seems confident it can meet the deadline and hopes to put the technology into a fifth of Beijing’s three million cars by August of 2008. As non-essential cars will be pretty much banned from the city during the Olympics this will mean that the majority of vehicles will be equipped with a navigation system. The illustration is of a Nissan navigation system. Possibly not the one to be used in Beijing but definitely Nissan.
Source: Engadget