Northeast China's Liaoning Province is to spend over 8 billion yuan (US$960 million) in expressway construction this year.

An official from the local communications department said this is the biggest traffic investment in Liaoning over the past decade. It will extend the province's expressways to 2,788 kilometres.

The key projects include the Dandong-Zhuanghe Expressway and Shenyang-Fushun Expressway, which are both now under construction. The two expressways run for a total of 212 kilometres.

Road projects

Another three road projects will start in the second half of this year. These include the Fuxin-Chaoyang, Liaozhong-Xinmin and Shenyang-Kangping expressways.

Liaoning plans to construct 2,020 kilometres of expressways over the next 15 years and link all counties by 2020.

Sources close to the local communications department said this year's spending is only the basic budget and Liaoning may spend more.

The province had 1,637 kilometres of expressways by the end of last year. Eleven of its 14 major cities have been connected. It allocated a total investment of 4.63 billion yuan (US$553 million) to the construction of expressways in 2004.

Also, the local government signed a 50-billion yuan (US$6 billion) loan contract with the China Development Bank this January which will mainly be spent in the communications, energy and manufacturing sectors.

Expressway network

Liaoning is not the only region developing an expressway network. The newly passed national expressway plan means China will invest 2 trillion yuan (US$240 billion) in an 85,000-kilometre-expressway network scheduled to be built over the next 30 years.

It will have seven routes out of Beijing, nine routes from north to south and 18 from east to west, and will connect all cities with a population above 200,000. By the end of 2004, 34,000 kilometres of expressways had been in use in China.

Experts said China's overall economic output would double by 2020, which will lead to a demand for a more effective and efficient transport system.

China's expressway construction has been on a fast pace since the 1990s.