Beijing officials forced 1.3 million cars off the city streets yesterday, but I still ended up in a traffic jam.

With a year to go before the Olympics and 1,200 new cars on the roads of the capital every day, bureaucrats are experimenting with ways of freeing the city’s chronic gridlock. Cars with even-number licence plates were banned yesterday and will be again tomorrow; today and Monday they have the run of the roads as vehicles with odd-numbered plates are forced to stay at home.

With taxis and military cars exempt, the four-day experiment puts a third of Beijing’s 3 million cars out of action. The results were varied.

Traffic in the preweekend rush hour flowed more swiftly than usual. Maybe the tooting of horns by drivers trying to gain an inch here or there was less frenetic. But I was still stationary for more than ten minutes during an 8km (5 mile) journey that took me half an hour – not bad for getting home on a Friday evening.

Traffic along the eight-lane inner ring road – a route once plotted by the ancient city wall – still stuttered to a halt at main junctions. And the choking pollution still hung thick in the air, blurring the silhouettes of high-rise buildings.

More than 6,500 traffic police patrolled city streets and set up road blocks to pull aside wrong-numbered vehicles. Offenders faced a fine of 100 yuan (£6.50).

One traffic policeman said that he had picked up only one car in 1½ hours. Another stood by the side of one of the main thoroughfares peering at licence plates but finding no one to stop.

Commuters seemed pleased at the reduction in the number of traffic jams. The city’s transport system laid on dozens of extra underground trains and extended the operating hours by half an hour at the start and end of the day. An additional 722 buses and trams plied city streets, making an extra 8,883 journeys.

One middle-aged woman taking the No 4 bus into Tiananmen Square said: “This is much, much better than usual. I take the bus every day and today it is much less crowded because there are so many more buses. It’s a great idea and I think it should be like this every day.”

The underground was far more crowded than usual, despite the additional trains. Views were mixed. With barely room to breathe, one young man said that he preferred to drive his car, “although I can see that this is more convenient for other people”.

A middle-aged commuter was unhappy with the larger-than-usual number of people. At some stations people could not even squeeze on to the trains in the crush. He said: “I use the underground every day so I don’t find this new system very convenient for me.”

There was no visible increase in the number of cyclists in the city once famed as heaven for those on two wheels. However, Hu Zhangyong, a taxi driver, was delighted. “If only it could be like this every day. I remember in the 1990s when that was the rule: odd-numbered cars on odd-number days. Still, it’s good to do this for the Olympics.”

Officials said that it was too early to say whether the four-day experiment would reduce pollution levels.

Jacques Rogge, the President of the International Olympic Committee, who was in Beijing to mark the 12-month countdown, said last week that some endurance events at next year’s Games might have to be postponed if the air quality was not good enough.

Beijing is one of the world’s most polluted cities, and poor air quality, blamed partly on heavy traffic, has long been a top concern for athletes and officials. But by the end of yesterday the capital still lay under a pall of choking smog.

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