(With China's reform, opening and the continuous economic development, the transportation infrastructure is playing an increasingly important role in the social and economic development, whose construction progress is accelerated. Because of China's economic growth and the income per capita increase, people's living and working rhythm speeds up, who has have a much stronger sense of time. Therefore, the development of high-speed, convenient traffic modes and facilities in China, such as expressways, are very necessary. On the other hand, because of the rapid growth of vehicles since 80's in China, the existing highway network can hardly satisfy the requirement of road transport's development. As a symbol of road modernization, expressways emerged in late 1980's and then developed rapidly in China. From 1989 to 1994, the length of China's expressways had increased to more than 1603 km, whose yearly growth was about 200í½300km. .Moreover, a number of expressways are being built or on planning. It can be predicted positively that the construction scale and the development speed will exceed before. China's expressway network may tentatively form in early 21st century. This paper mainly analyses China's expressways development and operation in the view of investment and operating effect, and looks into their development prospects. (A)
Abstract