If there's one thing that's on the mind of the average Beijinger aside from bad air and hooking up, it's traffic. Whether you're a private car driver, taxi addict, subway fiend, biker or pedestrian, there's no way around having to grapple with Beijing's crippling congestion.

We started 2013 with a veritable taxi strike on our hands and ended it with a few new subway lines as well as a bevy of high-tech transportation solutions. So with that under our belt, let's take a look at Beijing's 2013 Year in Traffic and Transport:

1. Subway 202: Can You Hit All the Stations in Just One Day?

Two intrepid Australians -- a father and son team -- attempted to visit every subway station in Beijing's extensive network one day in January. They were never heard from again. Just kidding, the duo completed their trip in a little over 14 hours and their trail can be relived on their blog of their adventure, Subway Saturday. 

2. Taxi Torment: What's Driving It?

The year 2013 began, for most of us, waving wildly to flag Beijing taxis that seemed intent on passing us by. Was it discrimination? Laziness on the part of the cab drivers? Or was it that taxis just weren't able to make a living sitting in a traffic jam with a passenger in the back seat and the meter charging less than the cost of the gas for the idling engine? Michael Cormack of our now-defunct sister mag Agenda put in his two cents here.

3. Record Breakers: Beijing Subway is the World's Busiest

In news that will not come as a surprise to anyone nearly trampled to death during a typical rush hour in the Guomao Line 1 / Line 10 interchange, Beijing's subway network was named the world's busiest in March as it exceeded 10 million passenger trips in one day.

4. Stroll Toll: Beijing to Enforce Fine for Jaywalking

From the Department of Making Up Laws That No One Will Enforce came this edict last April: Beijing will fine pedestrians RMB 10 for crossing against the light. Announced April 10, the new regulation was chalked up by most as a late April Fool's Day joke. Pedestrians then proceeded to walk against the light as normal.

5. Subway Scam: Think Twice About Free Rides

Everyone knows Beijing doesn't issue annual subway passes -- heck it'd put those thousands of people employed as ticket sellers out of a job. With that in mind its hard to believe people actually fell for this scam in which a con artist sold them fake annual passes.

6. Can't Hail a Cab? How to Use the Didi Dache App

With Beijing taxis all but impossible to hail in the first few months of the year, it wasn't long before technology and ingenuity came in to fill the gap in the form of location-based taxi booking apps such as Didi Dache. These apps allow users to announce the destinations to which they are going and offer an additional fee as an enticement to attract drivers. We explained briefly how to use one here. The apps were an instant hit.

7. How to Get a Fair Cab Ride at the Airport

In another in a series of regulations designed to make taxi passengers happy, the goverment threatened Beijing cab companies with hefty fines if they received an inordinant amount of complaints against them. In this blog post we outline the measures.

8. It's official: Beijing Taxi Fares to Rise

The era of the RMB 10 ride came to an end mid-year as regulators finally approved a hike of taxi rates. The move was made after months of citizen complaints about drivers who wouldn't take passengers at certain times or on certain routes because such fares were unprofitable.

9. Can't Use an App for That: Taxi and Hospital Apps Banned

At just about the same time when both taxi drivers and passengers agreed that taxi booking apps were the bee's knees, the Powers That Be declared them illegal as they rushed to market an "offical" replacement app that had all the clunky, inefficent markings of a typical state-run effort. The May ban slowed adoption of the commercially-produced taxi apps for about 3-1/2 minutes until the populace realized that they'll just ignore this law like the jaywalking rule mentioned in #4 above.

10. Taxing Times: A Modest Proposal for Dealing with the Cab Crisis

Beijinger back page columnist George Ding had a brilliant idea to help solve the taxi crisis: Standardized exams ala the gaokao for drivers. George's proposed test will ask them to recite the shortest routes from one place in the city to another, explain why spitting out the window is unhygienic, and refrain from cursing for 60 minutes in rush hour traffic.

11. Nothing Can Stop Beijing's Black Cab Explosion

Unregulated, free-market drivers that help people get to and from where they need to go in an efficient and cost-efficient manner: Just the kind of thing a bureaucracy hates. Beijing's no different, and with many so-called "black cabs" stepping in to offer services where regular taxis did not this summer, the authorities stepped in to warn us unsuspecting citizenry of the dangers of dealing with such road bandits.

12. Taxi Apps are Back (and Legal) in Beijing

After ham-handedly banning taxi apps in June and failing miserably to convince everyone to switch to a “ridiculously flawed” state-run version, city authorities gave up trying and just said that people can go ahead and use the apps that already had become de rigeur for most Beijing taxi drivers and passengers.

13. Will Beijing See a Congestion Fee?

With traffic showing no real signs of improvement and government attempts to stop new car purchases doing almost nothing to stem the tide, Beijing raised the idea of imposing London-style congestion fees on autos entering the city. To date the discussions that started over the summer have not resulted in any solid plans.  

14. How to Exchange Empty Bottles for Subway Credit on Line 10

A rather funky way of recycling was announced in September in certain stations on Beijing's Line 10: the ability to trade in plastic bottles for subway credit. Though it hasn't exactly resulted in significantly cleaner streets and the machines were only installed in two stations, we applaud the effort and the creativity anyhow. Here's to the hope that we see more in 2014.

15. City Driving: Beijing Police Blame Women Drivers for Traffic Ails

Women Hold Up Half the Sky, as the Chinese saying goes, and if this article is to be believed then they also hold up more than half the traffic in Beijing. As noted on The New York Times' Sinosphere blog, a series of posts on the traffic police's official Weibo page entitled "Female Drivers Please Note" provided helpful hints for female drivers to overcome their "lack of sense of direction."

16. Number 23? Beijing to Add Six More Subway Lines

Beijing's bold plan to make its subway system the largest and most extensive in the world took another Great Leap Forward with the announcement this fall that work was to begin on six more subway lines by the end of 2013. The new lines are expected to start operating in 2016.

17. Pervert or Troll? Subway Creep Hunts Female Calves on Beijing Metro

What with 10 million passenger trips daily, there's bound to be a few weirdos getting on the Beijing Subway now and again. This one was caught allegedy indulging in his leg fetish by hiding under a seat and filming women's gams in early December.

18. Beijing Subway Fare Increase Proposals: Let Us Count the Ways

With news that the Beijing Subway was being subsidized to the tune of RMB 18 billion annually, it comes as no surprise that the ridiculously low RMB 2 fare will need to be raised. Here we outline the proposals city officials have put forth for the coming fare hikes.

19. Beijing Taxis are Now Easier to Find ... Marginally

We ended the year 2013 with a little bit of positive news: the combination of the proliferation of taxi booking apps and the mid-year fare increase considerably eased the difficulty Beijingers were having getting a cab. We're still a long ways off from traffic perfection ... but we did make some strides along the way.