Hubei Yiba Highway Project

Hubei is a landlocked province in central China and a key industrial and agricultural production base with a population of 58.2 million in 2014. The lack of transport accessibility, especially in the mountainous areas in the west of the province, hindered its economic development. The objective of the Hubei Yiba Highway Project was to improve passenger and freight flows in the Yichang-Badong corridor by construction of an expressway with enhanced environmental management practices.

There project included two components. The first was a 173 km expressway with a design speed of 80 km per hour connecting Yichang City and Badong County at the border of Hubei and Chongqing Municipality. The expressway component included land acquisition and population resettlement, acquisition and installation of relevant electrical and mechanical facilities, and construction of toll plazas, buildings, seven interchanges, and about 35 km of interconnecting roads to improve integration with the local road network. The second component of the project was institutional strengthening to improve the capacity of the Hubei Provincial Transport Department in expressway construction and management. This included the following: (i) training on expressway construction and management, including design, safety, maintenance, finance, and the environment; (ii) preparation of guides to improve environmental monitoring and management; (iii) provision of equipment for expressway management and environmental monitoring; and (iv) conducting three studies -- (1) tunnel design and key construction technology in high stress region and soft rock area, (2) environment supervision and management system on highway construction projects, and (3) a comprehensive transport and logistics development plan for Hubei. These activities supported the sustainability of the project through improvements to environmental protection, environmental monitoring, and safety for tunnel construction.

The expressway was constructed with enhanced environmental management practices and has improved passenger and freight flows in the Yichang-Badong corridor. Implementation of the project’s environmental management measures provided practical knowledge to the institutions, contractors and consultants involved and enhanced their awareness of environmental protection and other safeguard practices. Environmental management practices adopted in the Yichang-Badong expressway project have been summarized into guides for use in other highway projects. These guides, coupled with the training provided, will have long-term benefits for highway constructions in Hubei.

Approximately 173 km of expressway, 37 km of Class II interconnecting roads, and 6 km of Class III interconnecting roads were completed. Average daily traffic on the Yichang-Badong expressway was 12,869 passenger car units per day as of December 2015 and exceeded the project target by 82 percent. Traffic diverted from the existing corridor exceeded project targets by 56 percent (more traffic diversion achieved than expected). The cost of shipping ore and agricultural products from Yichang to Badong declined approximately 29 percent and passenger travel cost by bus along the expressway dropped by 23 percent. Travel time between Yichang and Badong decreased by over 3 hours from 5.3 hours on the existing roads to 2.2 hours on the expressway. Accidents on existing roads decreased from 425 in 2009 to 153 in 2015 and accidents on the Yichang-Badong expressway were 47 percent lower than the project target (53 accidents in 2015).

There were three incidents of non-compliance with the environmental management plan during implementation, which were immediately corrected and were highlighted to other contractors; as a result, there were no incidents of non-compliance thereafter. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the innovative environmental management measures piloted under this project.