Chairman of HCMC Le Hoang Quan instructed the city’s Transport Department to urge the contractors of environment improvement and urban upgrade projects.

He assigned leaders of the urban traffic management units of the Transport Department to take responsibility for urging the contractors to hasten the progress of the projects.

According to the Department, 199 projects are underway on 84 city streets serving environment improvement and urban upgrades. The boom of projects has created the increased frequency of traffic jams.

Tran Quang Phuong, director of the department, said this year alone the city had seen some 61 traffic jams lasting over 30 minutes, 23 more than the same period of last year. Twelve serious traffic jams occurred on the Saigon Bridge with each lasting nearly eight hours.

Phuong said one of the main reasons for the heavy congestion in the city’s central districts and on Highway 1A was the increase of road works that were mostly at junctions.

Some of the worst areas are the Cat Lai T-junction, the Saigon Bridge, Highway 1A through Binh Chanh District, the Hang Xanh junction, the intersection of Hoang Van Thu-Nguyen Van Troi-Phan Dinh Giot in Tan Binh District and on Le Van Sy, Nguyen Kiem, Truong Chinh and Cach Mang Thang Tam streets.

Phuong told the Daily at the meeting there would be no new road projects approved until early next year when many of the urban upgrade projects would be in their final stages. The new projects will be mostly on streets in outlying districts.

“I expect the traffic situation in central districts from the end of this year onwards will be much more comfortable with most of the road works cleared away,” Phuong said.

To avoid slow and careless road surface restoration, Phuong stressed that from January 1 contractors must leave a deposit equal to the amount of money in the contract when they register for a license to carry out the projects.

If the contractors are slow or careless, besides administrative fines, their deposits will be used to restore the road surface properly.

The Transport Department assigned Tien Phong Company to do a feasibility study for a project of automatic fee collection on cars running through the central districts as one of the measures to limit the number of cars in the downtown areas. Tien Phong Company is to complete the study within six months.

Chairman Quan also said that besides temporary solutions for the worsening traffic problem, the city was giving top priority to the development of beltways and metro construction as an important and long-term solution.

VietNamNet/SGT