China to expand rural road network
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China aims to extend its road network in rural areas to 3.9 million km by 2015, according to China's transport authorities on Thursday.
China will focus on upgrading roads and bridges during its 12th Five-Year-Plan period (2011-2015) to ensure all townships and 90 percent of the villages are accessible by vehicles, China's Vice Minister for Transport, Feng Zhenglin, said at a conference.
By the end of 2010, around 1,200 townships and 120,000 villages still had no sealed roads linking to them, 90 percent of which were located in the western regions and other poor areas, according to Li Shenglin, China's Minister for Transport.
In the next five years, China will continue to invest heavily in construction of rural roads, with investment for this year exceeding 30 billion yuan (4.55 billion U.S. dollars), Li said.
"In the next five years, we should focus on improving the quality of roads, instead of just quantity," Li said.
China's central government invested 197.8 billion yuan (29.97 billion U.S. dollars) over the past five years in rural road construction.
Altogether 527,000 km of new roads were laid in the rural areas in the period, bringing the total coverage to 3.45 million km.
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