A ban on heavy-load trucks using Beijing's Badaling Expressway because of a string of fatal accidents saw huge jams on a neighboring national highway yesterday.

About 2,000 lorries were stranded in queues of up to 30 kilometers long on the road in the northwestern suburb of Beijing.

It follows the ban by the Beijing Traffic Management Bureau on trucks carrying weights of more than 2 tons using the expressway. But those carrying food products are excluded.

The new road weight limits, which began on Monday, aim to reduce the amount of traffic accidents caused by lorries and to improve the safety record on the expressway, said Zhang Jingchun, spokesman of the bureau.

Twenty-four coach passengers were killed in a collision with a lorry on the expressway earlier this month.

It happened at a site near the notorious "Death Valley" area of the road. It has seen frequent accidents because of a continuous descending slope, which can cause brake failures.

The new ban, however, has added burdens on the national highway 110, which is the only route lorries can take if they are banned from the expressway connecting the downtown area and Badaling, a major section of the Great Wall in Yanqing County of the capital city.

Wang Zhiyuan, an official with the Yanqing traffic police brigade, said the number of trucks using the route has reached 8,000 since Monday, while the highway is only designed to have capacity for 2,500-3,000 vehicles per day.

Many traffic police have been mobilized to supervise the implementation of the ban as well to ease the heavy traffic, reported the Beijing Evening News yesterday.

Design loopholes and pervasive overloads of lorries are blamed as the cause of frequent accidents on Badaling Expressway, said Mayor Wang Qishan, at a meeting on Monday.

The original design of the expressway was for the use of tourism vehicles traveling between the capital's downtown and the Great Wall, said He Yong, a researcher with the road safety institute under the Ministry of Communications.

But now the expressway has become a crucial route for trucks going from Beijing to other neighboring provinces like Hebei and Shanxi.

He added the ban of trucks on the expressway was only a makeshift way to reduce traffic accidents on the expressway, and said that a second expressway was likely to be built connecting Changping and downtown Beijing in 2007.

(China Daily December 14, 2005)