I am impressed with Chinese highway construction. All those civil engineers that got the top marks at US universities are back home running the highways departments.
"Included in this massive road-building undertaking are numerous challenging and spectacular bridges, whose length, design and engineering challenges make China home to the majority of the top-ranked structures in the world."
"China's highways go the distance
By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
BEIJING — Need to get someplace in China? Try today, the down day in a travel stampede unmatched anywhere.
New elevated highways link the city of Fuzhou, China, to the surrounding towns and villages of Fujian province.
AFP/Getty Images
The Year of the Dog, the lunar new year celebrated in much of Asia, began Sunday. In China, it triggered the world's largest annual mass migration, sending hundreds of millions of Chinese homeward for the festival. At week's end, they will reboard trains, planes and buses so crammed with humanity that sales of adult diapers have soared because getting to washrooms on crowded passenger trains can be impossible.
The record number of travelers — more than 2 billion journeys in the 40 days from Jan. 14 to Feb. 22, by government estimates — underscores the new mobility of Chinese society. This year, it also has drawn attention to highway construction underway in China, which is in the midst of the greatest road-building boom since the United States began linking the Lower 48 with interstate highways in the 1950s.
Today, China is stitching itself together with concrete and asphalt. Its goal: highways that reach all 31 provinces — from the Himalayas of Tibet in the southwest to the Gobi Desert in the north.
ON THE ROAD
1913: China builds first modern highway.
1949: Total road length open to traffic is 50,000 miles.
1988: First expressway — 11.5 miles long — built near Shanghai.
1998: Major construction of expressways begins.
2000: Number of private cars on the road is 6.25 million.
2005: Number of private cars on the road increases to 17 million.
2006: Expressways total 25,480 miles.
2020: Expressway mileage likely to reach 53,000 miles; China likely to be world's leading carmaker.
Source: Chinese government
Already, China's expressway network is second only to America's. "No other country can compete with China when it comes to the expansion speed of road building," says Wang Yuanqing, a professor at the Highway College of Chang'an University in Xian.
The vast majority of New Year trips — 1.86 billion by the Ministry of Communication's estimate — will be made on the roads. Roughly 700,000 buses will handle the strain.
Thousands of travelers crowded central Beijing's Bawangfen bus station Wednesday. "I couldn't get a train ticket this year," said Fan Xiuzhu, 50, as she kept watch over bags of New Year gifts she was taking home to northeast Liaoyang. "But the expressway has cut my journey from 15 hours to eight, the same time as the train.
"The buses are quite luxurious now, with air conditioning, toilet and video. Not like before, when they were filthy and smoky, with hard seats and people packed in the aisle."
Over the past five years, China has spent more on transportation infrastructure than in the previous five decades of Communist Party rule.
From 2001 to 2005, expressways grew by 15,350 miles, more than doubling the total length to 25,480 miles. The United States has 46,000 miles of interstate. By 2020, China is likely to overtake the United States. India has more road miles, but a third are unpaved.
China's high-speed expressways, with speed limits of 75 miles per hour, grew by 4,163 miles in 2005 alone and will stretch 3,107 miles farther this year. The United States built 41,000 miles of new highway from 1957 to 1969; China plans 30,262 miles this decade.
America's interstates brought prosperity and change. China's are doing the same. Many of those using the new roads are migrant workers who have left villages and farms for jobs in booming urban China. The government estimates at least 140 million rural Chinese have left the countryside for the bright lights of the city. The New Year festival is one of the few extended public holidays that give them a chance to return to their roots.
Away from the smooth surfaces of major highways, the inequality of modern China becomes clear. Many rural roads, especially in areas populated by ethnic minorities and near borders, are little more than mud tracks. That has prompted the government to promise 112,000 miles of new rural highways this year alone.
The environmental impact of the road boom is worsened by air pollution — passenger car sales jumped 26% last year. But "even developed countries adopt the 'develop first and refine later' strategy," says highway expert Wang. "We are now trying to build environmentally friendly roads."
China is stressing initiatives that minimize the damage of road construction. However, efforts to get drivers to choose more environmentally friendly cars and use low-sulfur fuels are meeting resistance.
"Chinese car buyers are not rational," Li Xinmin of the State Environmental Protection Administration told a conference in July. "They buy vehicles to show others what a large and beautiful car they have."
As highways expand and car sales boom, cross-country road trips that were once unthinkable are exciting China's newly affluent urban class.
"The road network is great now. You can drive anywhere," says Hou Xin, 28, a computer technician and member of one of several auto clubs now multiplying in Beijing.
In August, Hou and his wife drove their China-made Jeep Cherokee more than 2,300 miles along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route that linked China to Western civilizations. For much of the journey to the far western province of Xinjiang, they were able to travel on new expressways.
Xinjiang, inhabited by Muslim Uighurs, is a place most Chinese "wouldn't dare go before; it's too remote. But now conditions are better," Hou says. "It's like going abroad, to another culture (because people living there) don't understand Mandarin" Chinese.
Gas stations and motels are springing up along the expressways to service the growing traffic volume. Hou's two-week trip cost him $125 a day for gas, a room and tolls. "The toll operators are the only robbers left on the roads," he says.
Hou relishes each escape from polluted Beijing. "The sky is so blue in western China."
Starting in July, a new train running 2,300 miles from Beijing to the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, will shorten a weeklong journey by rail and bus to just 48 hours. Even so, Hou and his wife plan to drive. "It's a great feeling speeding through beautiful scenery," he says. "I feel so free on the road."
NEWS>>CHINA HIGHWAYS DIRECTOR EXPLAINS HIS BUILDING PROGRAM PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
SEMINAR PRESENTATION BY UC BERKELEY ALUMNUS, JIANFEI ZHANG, DIRECTOR GENERAL, CHINA DEPARTMENT OF HIGHWAYS (GO TO SELECTED BRIDGE PHOTOS FROM HIS POWERPOINT.)
Jianfei Zhang (at left), Director General of the China Department of Highways, and a Ph.D. alumnus of the UC Berkeley Transportation Engineering program, offered succinct advice to the audience of students and faculty at a special meeting of the Weekly Transportation Seminar hosted by ITS and TRANSOC on Nov. 15, 2005. At the end of his talk, "Highway Development in China," Zhang responded to a question about the difficulties in managing such a monumental task by saying, "Plan courageously, implement cautiously."
The building of China's highway system is indeed a large task. In 1990, the government committed to building a 35,000-km National Trunk Highway System by 2020, which would provide major links to the capital of Beijing, tie together the major economic regions in the east with one another and build roads to the far west. Scheduled to be completed in 2007, 13 years ahead of schedule, that project has been followed by an 85,000-km National Expressway Network, expected to be finished in 20 to 30 years, as well as a Rural Road Development Program, which was started in 2003 and has resulted in some 132,000 km of roads being paved each year, a pace that is projected to continue through 2010.
Bridging Economic Gaps with Roads
A key element of the highway development plan is to lessen the gaps in economic growth between the crowded, more prosperous population centers occupying the eastern 50 percent of the country's land mass and those in the western half. The disparity in density and access is shown by the fact that 90 percent of the country's population occupies the eastern 50 percent. The severe topography and weather in the western regions are challenging. Zhang noted that the average elevation in the far western portion of the country is 5,000 meters, so the soil is permanently frozen. When it is paved with blacktop, the resulting absorption of heat causes the soil to melt, which undermines the pavement.
Although China's land area is roughly equivalent to that of the U.S., its huge population, more than four times that of the U.S., and its rapid economic growth have placed huge new demands on transportation systems.
Freight shipments are rising steadily. The number of containers shipped has risen 30 percent a year for each of the past 10 years, Zhang noted.
Although the vehicle fleet, some 28 million vehicles in 2004, is still much smaller than the U.S.'s, it has nearly tripled in the last 10 years, and vehicle production is speeding up. While it took eight years to add 1 million vehicles to the fleet at the start of the 10-year period, it most recently took less than one year to add another 1.3 million.
The National Expressway Network will have about the same number of freeway miles as the U.S. Interstate system. It is designed to create links among transportation hubs, politically significant locales like provincial capitals, ports that cater to foreign trade, domestic trading points, airports, railroads and other key economic and political regions. It will connect all 300 plus Chinese cities with populations of 200,000 or more, using 34 routes, seven radius roads from Beijing, nine longitudinal and eighteen latitudinal.
Spectacular Bridges
Currently, 29 percent of the network has been built, and 20 percent is under construction; the remaining 50-plus percent still needs to be planned. Spending is at roughly $18 billion a year, and will drop to $12 to $15 billion after 2010. Included in this massive road-building undertaking are numerous challenging and spectacular bridges, whose length, design and engineering challenges make China home to the majority of the top-ranked structures in the world.
Zhang described the challenges as multi-tiered: convincing the public that these projects are worthwhile, finding a sustainable way to finance them without over-reliance on tolls, avoiding damage to infrastructure from overloading as the number of vehicles soars, ensuring the new roads are durable and built to consistent and high standards, and satisfying environmental and economic concerns.
—Phyllis Orrick, Publications Manager, Institute of Transportation Studies " |
