12-07-2015
The high-grade highway between Lhasa and Nyingchi is expected to open by the end of July, 2015.
At present, more than 90 percent of the highway have been completed, and infrastructure construction for the project will be finished before June 30th.
"As the priority and key projects, the Bayi bridge and tunnel across the Niyang River have now entered the stage of completion", said He Dongxue, director of the Comprehensive Coordination Headquarter in Nyingchi.
Two sections of the highway have been constructed simultaneously: the Nyingchi section from Nyingchi to Gongpo Gyamda, and the Lhasa section from Lhasa to Medro Gongkar. Strict quality control has ensured that the whole process has been tracked and audited, supervised and inspected, for a final acceptance rate of 100 percent. The production of the highway is required to be safe with zero deaths.
New technology and materials were applied in the construction of Lhasa-Nyingchi highway. A group was established to research pavement crack prevention technology, and after repeated trials they succeeded in collecting a large amount of data. For the first time in Tibetan highway construction the anti-cracking fabric was applied to the pavement, and has so far achieved good results.
It is estimated that the total static investment in the high-grade Lhasa to Nyingchi highway is 38 billion yuan. The grade-one highway has four lanes, and has been designed for speeds of 80km/hour (a fast highway in the plateau environment). From the starting point at Zhenba village in Nyingchi City to the end in Lhasa’s new Liuwu District, the total length is 409.2km. Once the road opens to traffic, travel time between Lhasa and Nyingchi will be reduced by at least three hours.
