On December 22nd, Yiling--Huanghua first class highway rebuilding project kicked off in Yiling District. Designed as a urban main road, the 8.2- kilometer-long stretch of the highway between the Yanjia River Canal Bridge in Yiling and Langtian Building Materials Industry Zone in Huanghua town is to be constructed by Hubei Engineering Corporation of China Power Group Corporation with a total investment 0.82 billion yuan, the main work to be finished in 18 months and the entire project to be completed by December 2018.

The rebuilding work, ranked as a transportation infrastructure construction project of Hubei Province’s Twelfth Five-year Plan and Yichang Urban Master Plan (2005-2020), is an key passage in the north connecting Yiling District and Yichang main city with Shanghai—Chengdu Expressway, and is an main channel to places like Xingshan, Shennongjia and Baokang. Its construction is also an item in the municipal work assessment. As planned, the highway will have a roadbed of 36 meters and will be two-way six-lane with the exception of the Huanghuaji Road ( Baoyi Road) section which will have just four lanes two ways with a roadbed of 24.5 meters.

It is required by the Yiling District Committee and the district authorities that the Yiling-Huanghua highway be built into an ecological and demonstrative project with high quality, and also an open road that can bring prosperity to the district.

In recent years, Yiling District has been vigorously implementing the urban and rural development strategy, which puts transportation on the top agenda, by stepping up the urban and rural infrastructure connection with different elements interacting and different functions complementing each other, and strengthening the important traffic node links between the Xiaoxita District, Yichang main city and surrounding townships through building high-grade trunk highways and expressways, and making the transportation network integrated in order to lay a solid foundation to accelerate the construction of the provincial urban and rural overall development demonstration zone. During the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period, Yiling District has already invested 6.9 billion on the fixed assets in transportation construction, with the direct district-level investment reaching 1.236 billion so that a large number of quality transportaion projects have been completed like Xiaoya Road, Guanzhuang Road, Longlei Road, Wuxia Road, Longquan Avenue, Huangbo River Channel Regulation. So far, the whole district’s highway mileage has reached 4400 km and 172 administrative villages have been connected by cement roads, achieving the goal of “buses to every village”. (Reporter: Li Yuling Correspondent: He Ying, Zhu Yongjie)