For whom the road booth tolls?
(New York Times\Chinadaily.com.cn)Updated: 2007-05-16 10:12 China is building more toll roads with its rocketing number of expressways, but legions of drivers are trying almost anything to avoid them.
In Chongqing municipality of central China, so many owners of private cars and trucks are using fraudulent toll-exempt military plates that one toll highway has estimated its annual losses at roughly 10 million yuan, or $1.2 million.
In March a driver outfitted his vehicle like an ambulance, with flashing lights and an emergency response phone number painted on the side. He then raced through a highway tollbooth as if rushing to a hospital, until the police arrested him.
By 2020, China will have completed almost 53,000 miles of expressways, a network roughly equivalent to the Interstate System in the United States. Against the backdrop of the brisk growth of China's economy, expressways are considered as crucial to developing its western and interior provinces.
Though the country has been adding millions of new cars to the roads every year, for some drivers, especially farmers, tolls are expensive compared with income levels.
Near a highway tollbooth in a farming village of Hebei Province, every day lines of cars and trucks try to skip the toll by cutting through the village on a narrow road.
But two villagers, Wang and Gu, try to send them back. They said the tollbooth operator is paying the village a monthly fee to help crack down on toll jumpers. For its part the village is trying to stop heavy trucks from ruining its roads. The two men regulate traffic with a long, crooked stick that goes up and down like a crude crossing barrier.
It costs $1.30 to go from the Beijing airport to the city, and about $5 for the roughly 25-mile trip from the capital's northeastern suburbs to the Great Wall. The cost may be not that much for a Westerner, but a lot here, where an average farmer - most of whom cannot afford cars - makes less than $400 a year and urban factory workers can average roughly $1,000 or perhaps a bit more.
"The price of the tolls is an issue," said Greg Wood, a consultant who worked on the World Bank report. Wood said China needed to ensure that prices did not inhibit traffic from growing to the levels necessary to pay off the debt on the roads.
As toll roads have expanded, many areas nearby have become toll escape zones. Wood said some private companies investing in toll roads were demanding the right to collect tolls on adjacent roads as one means of curbing toll jumpers.
On the outskirts of Beijing it is common to see lines of trucks stretching for several miles along a narrow two-lane highway as they try to avoid the toll on the faster highway nearby.
Chen Village is on the northwestern outskirts of the city of Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei Province. In recent years, the public are discontent with the blossomed fees on roads and bridges around the city and a group of party representatives circulated a petition last year after higher authorities allowed a Hong Kong investor to open a tollbooth in exchange for fixing a bridge.
Near Chen Village, the Shigang Highway opened several years ago with a tollbooth that charged cars $1.30. Trucks are charged about twice as much. Motorists quickly began exiting before the tollbooth and detouring through the village, which had recently pooled donations from farmers to pave local roads.
Miao Penghu, the head of the village, said the village had responded by opening its own unofficial toll station he post currently overseen by Wang and Gu - to pay for the damage to roads by heavy trucks. But such unsanctioned tollbooths were outlawed a few years ago. Miao said that the village no longer collected tolls but that it was under contract with the Shigang Highway's managers to block traffic.
"They are paying us, and by us turning the trucks around, they are making money, too," Miao said.
A city taxi driver who regularly passes through the village laughed at such a notion. He said the village fee was usually 25 cents or a bit more. He avoids it because he speaks the local dialect and can pass as a resident.
"In China," he driver said, "whoever builds the road can collect
tolls."
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