With an estimated price tag of nearly 10 billion yuan (about US$1.2 billion), the work will be carried out on the 258 km Jiangsu section of the expressway, and is scheduled to be completed by the end of June, 2006.

The section also links other economically booming cities within the province, namely, Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou.

The move comes as the expressway, which opened to traffic only six years ago, finds itself in an increasing need to cope with the growing traffic volume.

The number of vehicles moving through the section over the past four months showed a 30 percent year-on-year increase, and traffic volume has grown by an average of 20 percent annually since the highway first opened to traffic in Sept.1996.

Shanghai metropolis is currently the largest industrial and commercial center on the Chinese mainland, whereas Jiangsu Province now ranks number two, with its gross domestic product exceeding 1 trillion yuan (US$ 121.9 billion), second only to south China's Guangdong Province.

The entire Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway was opened to traffic in late 1996 following the completion of the Jiangsu section, which was built at an expense of 6.2 billion yuan (US$760 million).

Some parts of the expressway have been damaged because of excessive traffic volume. As a result, a major road surface repair project on the 96.7km eastern section of the expressway was launched from April 10.

By early 2002,the average speed of an automobile running on the eastern section of the expressway had dropped from 80 to 50 km per hour.

Residents of Suzhou, a prestigious scenic city with an emerging high-tech industrial belt, who wish to drive to Shanghai, sometimes have to leave several hours early in case of traffic congestion on the 90 km Suzhou-Shanghai section.

According to Lu Liusheng, chief of the Transport and Communications Bureau of the Suzhou City Government, fast economic growth has outpaced the growth of transportation-related infrastructure in Suzhou.

Suzhou City has invested a total of 13.6 billion yuan (US$1.65 billion) in transportation-related infrastructure projects over the past three years, said the official.

This figure, added Lu, represents about 1.5 percent of the city's gross domestic product (GDP), close to the highest ratio in the world of investment in transportation projects to GDP.

"Still, our infrastructure cannot meet the demand and is outpaced by economic development," Lu said.

Direct foreign investment in Jiangsu Province totaled 3.3 billion US dollars for the first three months of this year, a rise of over 60 percent year-on-year, while State-owned and State-controlled industrial firms reported more than 21 percent in added industrial output value.

(Xinhua News Agency May 20, 2003)