Beijing's "blue sky" days, or days with fairly good air quality, reached 246 in 2007, five more than in 2006, local environment authorities said Tuesday.

The figure means 67.4 percent of days last year saw blue skies in the Chinese capital, a year-on-year increase of 1.4 percent, Du Shaozhong, vice director of the Beijing Environment Protection Monitoring Center, told the Beijing News.

The 246 days is one day more than last year's goal of 245 days, the report said.

The city had 32 days with a "grade A level" blue sky, six days more than the corresponding period of 2006, Du said.

Beijing enjoyed the most "blue sky" days in April, September and October in eight years, Du told the newspaper.

Xinhua news agency said the capital reported 25 days of blue sky in September, the most in seven years.

But the city still had 119 days of polluted air, with three days recording severely contaminated air quality, the report added.

Du said most of the polluted days happened in December when the city was blanketed in dense fogs for several days, which made air pollutants hard to disperse, the report said.

The Chinese capital launched a "Defending the Blue Sky" drive in 1998, when it had only 100 days of "blue sky."

As the host of the 2008 Olympic Games, Beijing has been working on reducing environmental pollution and improving air quality to ensure a "Green Olympics."

In one move, the city government has scrapped bus and subway fares to encourage residents to take public transport instead of driving private cars.

The city is also considering a traffic ban during the Olympics, in which drivers with even-numbered and odd-numbered license plates, excluding taxis, buses and emergency vehicles, will be told to stay off the roads on alternate dates or face fines.

During a four-day test of the traffic ban from August 17 to 20, about 1.3 million cars were barred from the city roads each day and the amount of pollutants discharged was cut by 5,815.2 tons, according to a report released by the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau.

(Shanghai Daily January 2, 2008)