60 People, 60 Stories

What lies ahead

By Tyrrell Duncan (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-09-30 08:26

Previously, China's per capita access to transportation was among the lowest in the world.

The government realized that this was a constraint to progress. Expansion of the road network enabled the economy to grow and allowed people all over the country to benefit from growth and gain access to better services. As people in China recognize, roads have therefore been a major driver of poverty reduction.

Over such a long period, there were many challenges - too many for me to list. Perhaps the greatest underlying challenge was for China to become familiar and comfortable with the approaches to road planning, organization and technology that had been successfully used to expand road networks in other countries.

China pursued this challenge cautiously and prudently, seeking out information about outside approaches and then testing these on a limited scale to see what could work in the Chinese context, before proliferating the best approaches on a wider scale. Today's road network, with its advanced structures and pavements, automated toll booths and GPS systems, demonstrates the results of this excellent approach to technology transfer and adaptation.

In a country as large as China, there are always going to be great challenges. In the road sector, a key overall challenge will be to decide when sufficient resources have been put into expressway construction and to assign more resources to completing the lower levels of the road network.

A key challenge is ensuring the new road network will be properly maintained. This depends on establishing sound policies and systems for the financing, planning and execution of maintenance.

Road safety is another big challenge. Accident fatality and injury levels remain many times higher than in western countries - so there is considerable scope for China to improve. Road safety is a complex challenge because it depends not only on building safer roads and safer vehicles, but also on changing driver behavior and supporting law enforcement.

The multi-sectoral nature of road safety improvement means that it depends on coordination among government agencies and cooperation between government and members of society.

Tyrrell Duncan is director, East Asia transport division and concurrently Asian Development Bank practice leader (transport).