To ease the city's traffic jam during the peak hours in the morning and evening, Beijing plans to stagger the work hours of employees of commercial institutions and shopping malls and adopt flexible work hours for the IT industry and research institutions.

In response to a proposal of adjusting the time put forward by Liu Guoxiang, a deputy to Beijing Municipal People's Congress, Beijing Municipal Transportation Commission said that Beijing would adopt two measures of staggering the time and implement flexible work hours to decrease the traffic congestion in the morning and evening. Based on a study of some areas, the city plans to run the flexible work hours in some industries, including IT and research institutions, on a trial basis and encourage the employees to work from home.

By staggering the time for going to work, the time for going to work is divided into three time sections of 08:00, 08:30 and 09:00 and the time arranged to leave work as 17:30, 18:00, and 18:30. In this way, it is expected that the traffic flow will be reduced by one-third or two-thirds for each time section.

Under the flexible work hour system, employees are allowed to adjust their schedule for going to work at a certain period of time of the day. For example, they can choose to either work from 08:00 to 17:00 or 09:00 to 18:00.

By the end of 2007, there were 3.1 million vehicles in Beijing and the number is still rapidly increasing.

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