Brush your teeth after eating garlic, be polite and don’t smoke while driving. That was the message Wednesday to Beijing's taxi drivers, who are on the frontline of a push by city officials to improve transportation and unsnarl the capital’s clogged, polluted highways — all with an eye to the image Beijing creates for the 2008 Olympics.“The taxi drivers are a window through which the foreigners will see Beijing, and we need to further regulate their services,” said Lin Xiaoming, vice director of the Beijing Transport Commission— an arm of Beijing’s municipal government.“Some of our residents complained that the drivers hardly knew the roads and some of the taxis were not clean,” Lin said. “We are aiming to improve our entire range of transportation services.”Officials cautioned female cabbies against brightly dyed red or yellow hair and large, oversized earrings. Male drivers have been told to keep their hair short. And both were admonished to clean up their cabs, and brush away the garlic — a key ingredient in many Chinese dishes.Drivers — a few work 24-hour shifts and sleep in their cabs —were also warned they could lose their licenses by overcharging or refusing to pick up fares. It's the latest warning about manners to the city’s 15 million residents. They’ve also been told to stop spitting in public, prodded to speak better English, and encouraged to form neat lines instead of pushing and shoving. It’s all designed to impress the 500,000 foreign visitors and 20,000 journalists expected in 16 months for the Olympics. Taxi drivers are the “micro problem” facing Olympic traffic planners. The bigger problem is the city's chronic traffic jams and underdeveloped subway system. A 10-km rush-hour trip Wednesday across the city’s 10-lane expressways took about an hour.Lin said about 3.3 million cars would be on Beijing’s streets by the time of the Olympics —up from only 1 million in 1996. He said 20-30 percent of cars would be taken off the streets to ease the gridlock. During the Games, government vehicles will be reduced, private owners will be urged not to drive, and Olympic lanes will be set up to speed officials to venues. “The traffic jams are a headache for everybody who lives in Beijing,” Lin said. “And they have become more frequent.” The city is also building several new subway and new bus lines. Lin said $ 11.7 billion had been spent in the last three years to improve Beijing’s transport network with that much for budgeted for the next three years.”
