Toll road firm budgets 1.78b yuan to widen expressway

Anhui Expressway is the latest mainland toll road company to launch a major road-widening project, investing 1.78 billion yuan to ease a bottleneck on the Hening Expressway.

The company plans to double the number of lanes from four to eight on one of the busiest sections of the expressway - its crown asset and a key traffic artery to Anhui's capital Hefei.

The section - a 42.1km corridor between Dashushan and the interchange at Longxi - is expected to reach capacity after several toll roads that feed into the expressway open over the next few years, according to company secretary Xie Xinyue.

'Hening Expressway will be connected with a number of new roads in the next two to three years, which will bring a lot more traffic into Hefei,' he said yesterday. 'We plan to start the road work later this quarter.'

The roads will feed into Hefei from the key outlying provincial towns of Huangshan, Luan and Huainan.

Mr Xie said 35 per cent, or 625 million yuan, of the expenditure would come from the company's internal resources while the balance would be mostly from bank borrowings.

'Based on our cash resources, we can cope with an annual spending of 1.5 billion yuan,' he said.