Work on widening the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway is expected to cause major traffic problems during next month's tomb-sweeping period, officials said yesterday.
Project managers have agreed to open several access roads only on weekends to facilitate tomb sweepers until April 10.
The extra access will be provided particularly from Shanghai to Suzhou, Jiangsu Province - where many locals' ancestral graves are located.
"We will guide more trucks to take the lower roads instead of the expressway during the peak season," Wu Juhui of the Shanghai Highway Administrative Office said yesterday.
Work began early last year to expand the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway from four lanes to eight.
Because of cold weather which could cause "technical problems," the project was suspended in December, but work recently resumed.
Because of the construction, more than 80 percent of the expressway has only two of the four lanes open.
By june, the four lanes from Nanjing to Shanghai will be completed, managers said.
The whole project is planned for completion by the end of this year.
The 275-kilometer expressway, mostly in Jiangsu Province, is one of the country's busiest.
Last year, more than 6.4 million Shanghai residents went to the suburbs or neighboring provinces to visit relatives' tombs in the two weeks before the Day of Pure Brightness on April 5.
According to Zhao Hanqing, a manager of a local long-distance bus station, it now takes more than seven hours to drive from Shanghai to Nanjing - compared with four hours normally.
"The longest queue I have even seen is more than three kilometers," he said.