State-of-the-Art of Road Transport China

Over the past twenty years, the rapid development of the Chinese economy has considerably increased the demand for passenger and freight transport. Because of the serious lack of highway infrastructure in the early days of the Reform and Opening, road transport used to be the “bottleneck” restricting the development of the social economy. Through continuous road construction over the past twenty years, the restriction of highway transport to social economy development has been somewhat alleviated. Currently in China there are two main problems concerning highway infrastructure: there are not yet enough highways and the technical rank level needs improvement, especially in western China and rural areas.

In the near future, rural highways will become the core focus of highway construction. In addition, improving efficiency will be the main approach for developing the economy. Therefore, infrastructure construction will have a stronger focus on “informationisation” and “intelligentisation”. This should improve the efficiency, service level and safety of national highway transport through advanced technologies such as information, electronics, computers and promote sustainable and rapid economic development through an intelligent highway transport system in China.