Yongan blazes trail on road maintenance

Yongan, a small city in Fujian province, has taken a number of innovative measures to put itself at the forefront of the province’s effort to improve the quality of its rural roads.

President Xi Jinping said in 2014 and 2017 that government at all levels should ensure that rural roads are well-constructed, well-managed, well-maintained and well-operated.

Jiang Xiandong, Party secretary of Yongan, said its roads had a total coverage of 2,217.4 kilometers opened to traffic as of the end of 2017, among which township roads and village roads accounted for 82.8 percent. At the end of 2011, over 90 percent of villages could be reached by car.

To take better care of its road system, Yongan invested more than 25 million yuan ($3.97 million) in 2015 to set up the province’s first multifunctional center for maintaining rural roads. It is equipped with functions to handle overloaded vehicles, improvement the environment nearby roads, and day-to-day road maintenance.

“The center is located on the city's ring road, which passes traffic to four nearby cities,” said Wang Lei, an official at the center.

“We weigh every vehicle with equipment located 1.5 km from our center. If a car is estimated to be overloaded, we order it to undergo a further inspection at the center,” he said. “Our weighing system is also connected to the Yongan police.”

Located in coastal Fujian province, Yongan is frequently hit by typhoons. The emergency response center is responsible for quickly limiting the impact of natural disasters on rural roads.

Li Dejin, an employee of the emergency center, said he and his colleagues rushed to repair more than 100 km of roads following a landslide resulting from a typhoon in the summer of 2016.

“A total of more than 90 workers spent nearly 48 hours removing mud and stones with carts, and finally reopened the road,” he said.

In addition, the city and township governments also purchased commercial insurance for road maintenance worth 1.32 million yuan in 2016, and were compensated to the tune of 8.92 million yuan after several disasters including Typhoon Meranti and Megi.

After building and maintenance, Yongan paid attention to its environmentally friendly and economically operation.

According to the city's Party chief, Yongan input 16 million yuan to launch automated electric public transport. It has located 160 rental electric vehicles at 14 service centers in the city since 2016, and residents can rent and return those cars using a smartphone app.

Yongan’s road system offers a good basis for rural logistics. The city government has cooperated with Alibaba, Chinese e-commerce giant, to establish Taobao service stations in rural areas.

Those service stations are operated by local people, and act as purchasing agents. Villagers can order what they want to buy online and also sell various local specialties, such as liquor and lettuce.

Chen Fagen is an operator of a Taobao service site in the village of Shangping village, which opened at the end of 2016. “Every day I get around 25 online orders from villagers and can earn 800 to 1,000 yuan every month,” he said.

According to the Yongan government, the service stations cover at least 100,000 villagers. The per capita disposable income in Yongan’s rural areas rose to 16,374 yuan at the end of 2017, with average annual growth of 8.7 percent over the past three years.