<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> <html> <head> </head> <body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"> As has been seen in China in many other ways, they are the masters of faking things... from license plates to military permits to avoid paying tolls.... something interesting to analyze... what to do, congestion tolls or other (complementary) measures? <div class="headline"><big> Chinese drivers hone the art of eluding the toll </big></div> <div> By Jim Yardley </div> <div class="pubdate"> Tuesday, May 15, 2007 Original source: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/15/news/china.php">http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/15/news/china.php</a>  <script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"> ord = Math.random() * 10000000000000000; document.write('<script language="JavaScript1.1" src="http://ad.fr.doubleclick.net/adj/asia.iht.com/index;cat=index;dcopt=ist;sz=120x600;ord=' + ord + '?" type="text/javascript"><' + '/' + 'script>'); </script> <script language="JavaScript1.1" src="http://ad.fr.doubleclick.net/adj/asia.iht.com/index;cat=index;dcopt=ist;sz=120x600;ord=1685920959047406.8?" type="text/javascript"></script></div> <div class="bodytextdiv"> CHEN VILLAGE, China: Few motorists in any country brighten at the sight of tollbooths ahead. In China, which is building more toll roads than any other country in the world, legions of drivers are trying almost anything to avoid them. In the city of Chongqing, a sprawling municipality in central China, so many owners of private cars and trucks are using fraudulent toll-exempt military plates that one toll highway has estimated annual losses at roughly 10 million yuan, or $1.2 million. In March, a driver outfitted his vehicle like an ambulance, with flashing lights and an emergency response telephone number painted on the side. He then raced through a highway tollbooth as if rushing to a hospital, until the police arrested him. For centuries, commoner and collector have waged a volatile contest in China that has occasionally toppled dynasties but never quite been resolved. Leaders of the current dynasty, the Communist Party, are worried enough about angry peasant farmers that they lifted the centuries-old agriculture tax as a populist gesture. Tolls are another matter. By 2020, if all goes as planned, China will have completed about 85,000 kilometers, or almost 53,000 miles, of expressway, a network roughly equivalent to the interstate highway system in the United States. China considers expressways crucial to maintaining its economic growth and to developing its western and interior provinces. But the cost is so exorbitant that China is financing much of the system with tolls that are, by Chinese standards, pricey. Two people who should know are Wang and Gu. The two men - both of whom declined to provide their first names - are posted at a dingy intersection in this farming village in Hebei Province, which surrounds Beijing. Not far away is a highway tollbooth. Every day, cars and heavy trucks, as steady and determined as a trail of ants, try to skip the toll by cutting through a narrow road in the village. Wang, 65, and Gu, 58, try to send them back. They say the tollbooth operator is paying the village a monthly fee to help crack down on toll jumpers. For its part, the village is trying to stop heavy trucks from ruining its roads. The two men regulate traffic with a long, crooked stick that rises up and down like a crude crossing barrier. Gu does the talking. Wang wields the stick. "Can I get through?" one motorist asked on a recent afternoon as other cars waited. "No," Gu replied. Only locals are supposed to be allowed to pass. Toll road building has been so feverish in China that roughly 40,000 kilometers of toll expressways were built from 1990 to 2005, according to the World Bank. At the same time, China has been adding millions of new cars to the roads every year - a seemingly perfect combination of vehicles and toll roads. But Chinese are famous economizers, and, beyond that, tolls are expensive compared to income levels. A recent World Bank report on China's highway construction program found that the toll roads were charging roughly the same as the German toll system - despite far lower per capita incomes in China. It costs 10 yuan for the toll road from the Beijing airport to the city, and about 38 yuan for the roughly 40-kilometer trip from Beijing's northeastern suburbs to the Great Wall. "The price of the tolls is an issue," said Greg Wood, a consultant who worked on the World Bank report. Wood said China needed to ensure that prices do not inhibit traffic from growing to the levels necessary to pay off the debt on the roads. As toll roads have expanded, many areas on the periphery have become the equivalent of toll escape zones. Wood said some private companies investing in toll roads were demanding tolling rights to adjacent roads as one means of curbing toll jumpers. On the outskirts of Beijing, it is common to see lines of trucks stretching for several kilometers along a narrow two-lane highway as they try to avoid the toll on the faster highway nearby. The toll can reach 38 yuan or higher. Chen Village is on the northwest outskirts of the city of Shijiazhuang, the gritty capital of Hebei Province. In recent years, tolls have blossomed on roads and bridges around the city. Public reaction has not been joyous. A group of local Communist Party representatives circulated an angry petition last year after higher authorities allowed a Hong Kong investor to open a tollbooth in exchange for fixing a bridge. Near Chen Village, the Shigang Highway opened several years ago with a tollbooth that charged cars 10 yuan. Trucks are charged easily twice as much. Motorists quickly began exiting before the tollbooth and detouring through the village, which had recently pooled donations from farmers to pave local roads. Miao Penghu, the head of the village, said the village had responded by opening its own unofficial toll station - the post currently overseen by Wang and Gu - to pay for the damage to roads by heavy trucks. But such unsanctioned tollbooths were outlawed a few years ago. Miao said the village no longer collected tolls but was under contract with the Shigang highway to block traffic. "They are paying us, and by us turning the trucks around, they are making money, too," Miao said. "It's a win-win situation." Or not. Ask the driver of small green taxi from Shijiazhuang who approached Wang and Gu. "You can't pass through," Gu announced. The taxi window was rolled down and an arm emerged with the universal lubricant of rural Chinese society: an offer of free cigarettes. "No, no cigarettes," Gu said. "Look at our road," he said. "It is all torn up." "But it is the trucks, not me," the taxi driver pleaded before finally speeding away in the opposite direction. Gu and Wang insist that deterrence is their sole purpose. Money no longer changes hands, they say. But one villager said that while the inspection point does send back some trucks, it also allows some cars to pass for a few yuan. "This is not a toll booth," Gu protested. "It is not a toll booth!" A city taxi driver who regularly passes through the village laughed at such a notion. He said the village fee is usually 2 or 3 yuan. "In China," the driver said, "whoever builds the road can collect tolls." </div> </body> </html>