HAIKOU, June 11. /TASS/. By the end of the fourteenth five-year plan (2021-2025), the Hainan authorities will invest more than 220 billion yuan (about $ 35 billion) in the construction of roads and railways, announced the provincial administration.
As specified in the plan for the development of transport communications, distributed by the office of the regional government, as a result of such investments, in the next five years, a multi-level transport communications system will be formed on the island, thanks to which it will be possible to get to any remote point of the island in just three hours.
The program dubbed "movement project 1431" stipulates that a person on Hainan will need only one day to get to any point on the planet; four hours to get to any of the largest cities in China and a maximum of three hours to travel anywhere on the island. In order to cross one of the two key economic and tourist zones of the province - the northern (includes the cities of Haikou and Wenchang, as well as Chengmai and Ding'an counties) and the southern (Sanya, Lingshui-Li, Ledong Li and Baoting Li-Miao Autonomous counties) — it only takes one hour.
According to the government's plan, by 2025 the length of Hainan's highways will reach 42,000 km, including 1,500 km of highways. As for the sphere of civil air transportation, by this time it will be easy to get from the province to 130 large settlements of China and to about 80 foreign cities. In this regard, it is planned to rapidly implement the third stage of construction of Meilan International Airport (Haikou).
"During the fourteenth five-year plan, Hainan will accelerate the construction of an intercity transportation network and reduce travel time. At the same time, routes linking urban and rural areas of the province will be optimized," reads the development plan.
Earlier, the provincial administration announced that in the next five years, it is planned to complete the construction of a unified network of highways on Hainan, thanks to which it will be possible to quickly cross the island both from north to south or from west to east, and from northeast to southwest, from southeast to northwest. In particular, direct routes will appear from Qionghai (east coast), where Boao Forum for Asia is held annually, to the deep-water port of Yangpu (northwest), from the popular with tourists Lingshui-Li Autonomous County (southeast) to the arid west coast, from Wenchang cosmodrome (northeast) through the main agricultural regions of the province to Lingao County, which stretches along the Qiongzhou Strait that separates Hainan from the mainland.