Traffic police fix fork in Foshan freeway

Traffic police in Foshan, Guangdong province, have improved a section of busy freeway in the Pearl River Delta city after receiving many complaints about the unreasonable design of a fork in the road.

Dotted lines have been painted to guide vehicles at the traffic violation black spot, along with an alternative lane and clear traffic signs, police said in a statement posted on their Sina Weibo micro blog on Tuesday.

“Traffic police attached great importance to the case and quickly launched a field investigation, in cooperation with related departments and the freeway company, that led to the implementation of optimization and improvement measures on Monday,” they said.

“Police will continue to listen to and respect public opinions and welcome supervision and suggestions from the public to help create and ensure good and smooth traffic operation in the months to come.”

Many drivers had been fined for violating traffic rules at the Y-shaped fork in recent months.

Statistics from Foshan traffic police showed that 184,373 violations by drivers had been found by electronic monitoring from March 18, 2020, to April 1 this year. Most of them changed lanes illegally.

The fork on the Foshan section of the Guangzhou-Taishan Expressway links Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong, to the cities of Foshan and Jiangmen in the western part of the Pearl River Delta.

Foshan traffic police denied online rumors that cameras had captured more than 624,000 drivers violating traffic rules and that drivers had been fined more than 120 million yuan ($18.4 million) in the past 12 months.

Guangdong’s provincial government sent a special task force to Foshan to help investigate the problem late last week.

An aerial video from a drone that was published online by a netizen late last week indicated that 27 vehicles violated traffic rules on the freeway section in just three minutes.

A driver is usually fined 200 yuan and has three points deducted from their driver’s license for illegally changing lanes on a highway.

A driver surnamed Chen said the design of the Y-shaped fork was unreasonable, as there were no dotted lines allowing vehicles operating in the left lanes to change lanes, and there were no signs to instruct vehicles to change lanes in advance.

“It is very easy for drivers to violate the traffic rules,” Chen said, adding that many drivers had been found to have violated traffic rules in recent months.

Yuan Zhenwen, a driver from Guangzhou, said traffic rules should aim to ensure good and smooth traffic operation, instead of being a way to levy fines.