China will continue its large scale road construction in the next 15 years, according to an official with the Ministry of Communications Tuesday.

At the third Euro-Asian Road Transport Conference, Dong Xuebo, director of the planning commission of the ministry, said China will concentrate on perfecting highroad network safety, convenience and reliability in the first 20 years of this century.

According to the ministry's plan, the total mileage of China's highroad network will reach 3 million kilometers by 2020, containing 85,000 km of highway and 650,000 km of the second grade, and above, highroad, he said.

Highways will connect all the cities with populations of more than 200,000 and will form a high-speed goods communication network.

Since the 1990s, Chinese road construction has been developing faster than ever.

From 1998 to 2004, the investment of communication capital assets has risen at a speed of 23 percent per year, occupying 10 percent of total capital assets and some four percent of the gross national product.

At present, China's large-scale highroad system has a total mileage of 1.87 million km, containing 34,300 km of highway, and the number of the civil motorcars has reached more than 29 million.

In 2004, the amount of passengers transported by highway reached 16.2 billion and the mileage was about 874.8 billion person/kilometers, which respectively covered 92 percent and 54 percent of the total amount, while the cargo delivered by highway reached 12.5 billion tons, covering 73 percent of the total freightage.

With the theme of "Road Transportation, Bridge Across Asia and Europe", the third Euro-Asian Road Transport Conference opened Sunday.

Nearly 300 overseas delegates and 400-plus domestic representatives are attending the conference, which is being co-hosted by the International Road Transportation Union (IRU) and the Chinese Ministry of Communications.

(Xinhua News Agency September 28, 2005)