With the economy burgeoning and with thousands of new cars hitting the streets of the major cities every day, gridlock is rapidly becoming the norm in China.
While the car is king in China, municipal authorities are gradually coming around to the idea that encouraging better public transport is the way to stop the urban infrastructure from seizing up and making sure that traffic foul ups don't interfere with grandstand events like the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and the Shanghai Expo in 2010.
This offers opportunities for companies in the traffic management business, such as Wexford-based Orly Technology, which began implementing a traffic management system on 5,000 buses in Guangzhou, the capital of the booming southern province of Guangdong, earlier this year.
"We see a big market in China because public transport is so important there. China has a huge need for control of public transport. It has to get used to attracting people to use public transport, and one way to do this is to make more information available," says Orly Technology's managing director, Ted O'Morchoe.
"With the system you can use your mobile phone or the internet to find out when the bus is going to be there. If you have to wait to get information about when the next bus is coming, then you are more likely to use an alternative. If you know what time it's coming, then you use it," he said.
Orly is using software group by Infocell Telecom Ltd, an Irish software company which has been bought out by a British firm.
The core product is Centurion, a real-time passenger information (RTPI) system that provides information for passengers on the bus, at the stop, as well as via the internet or by mobile phone.
It provides fleet management information for the bus company and public transport information for the local authority and can link to other intelligent transport systems (ITS) functions such as traffic light pre-emption, which means Centurion will turn the traffic light green for the bus if, for example, it is late or full.
"It's a relatively straightforward thing. We use the mobile phone network, the GPRS network and when 3G is rolled out here, we can use that. If we have 1,000 buses on our system, then it's basically 1,000 mobile phones, which is probably about the number of phones sold in half an hour in Beijing. The central server can be easily expanded as we need and proportionally, it's not really different whether there are 30 or 300 buses," he said.
O'Morchoe has plenty of experience in Asia, having lived in Singapore for 12 years, where he set up a company to represent Irish firms in the Asia-Pacific region.
"Our first foray into China came through Enterprise Ireland, when I was asked to give a talk to a visiting delegation from China, made up of a city delegation, its IT department and their equivalent of Enterprise Ireland. They wanted to know the reason for Ireland's software success," he said.
O'Morchoe is now setting his sights on the big prize, Beijing. The capital, with a population of 14 million, is getting bus-friendly for the Olympics in 2008.
"The great target is Beijing and we're obviously looking at other cities as well," said O'Morchoe.
"Beijing doesn't have space, although it does have the ability to build infrastructure quickly - it has built six ring roads in a remarkably short period of time," he said. Local knowledge and an ability to leverage on your experience in China are the keys to winning contracts in China, says O'Morchoe, and realising the sheer scale of the country is a valuable early lesson.
"China is not one country, it's a number of places. There are 11 or 12 places where you want a different approach - the right department in Shanghai is not necessarily the right one in Beijing. So we're talking to half a dozen different partners," he said.
