Expressway Bitumen Pavement Construction in China and Current Issues of General Concern

摘要

Since the late 1980s, when the reform and opening policy started in the mainland, it has been the most vigorous period of highway development at the fastest speed and in the largest scale ever in China's highway history. Since the Shenyang-Dalian Expressway was open to traffic in 1988, China entered a new era of high grade highway construction dominated by expressway and Class I highway. It has been the consecutive forth year with investment in highway construction over CNY200 billion per annum since 1998, as shown in Figure I and Table 1. Total highway mileage in the mainland reached 1.435 Million km, by the end of 2001, of which 19000km were expressway, in the second place in the world. The length of the expressway in China will be over 30000km in 2005. Most of the existing expressway are of bitumen pavement. Most of the National Trunk Highway System, known as 12 of "Five South-North Seven East-West" corridors, have started construction work; and the service level of the network is improving. Of the "Two South-North & Two East-West and Three Important Section", two important trunk corridors of 658km Jing-Shen (Beijing-Shenyang) expressway and 1262km Jing-Hu (Beijing-Shanghai) expressway have been completed, further improving the trunk corridor in the north-east, north and the east of China. The highway construction has promoted the socio-economic development, as well as the transport system development and the shares of highway passenger and freight transport volume of all the transport modes are increasing greatly.