GUANGZHOU: Pearl River Delta (PRD) residents are stressing the need for more integrated roads connecting parts of the region together.

In the region, more and more people are working in big cities, such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen, but they purchase homes in smaller cities.

For example, people working in Guangzhou now prefer to live in Foshan, as the real estate prices are cheaper and the distance between the two cities is only about 30 km.

For the same reason, many people working in Shenzhen now choose to live in Huizhou.

Even though the governments are constructing a "one-hour economic circle" in the PRD, the complicated and unexpected land traffic often does not allow people to get to where they want to go in time.

"During the Canton Fair (last week), I stayed in a hotel in Foshan at night and went to Guangzhou to attend the fair every morning," said Liu Zhihong, a Canton Fair buyer from Shandong. "However, traffic jams always delayed my arrival to the fair."

Chen Xiaofen is living in Nanhai county in Foshan and works for a company in the Tianhe district of Guangzhou.

In order to ensure that she arrives to work before 9 every morning, regardless of any accidents or traffic jams, she has to leave her home by 6:30.

"The schedule is very exhausting," Chen said. "I am even considering quitting my job in Guangzhou and finding another one closer to my home."

A more-integrated and cohesive land-traffic system in the region is needed to improve people's work efficiency.

"We need cooperation, but it's very difficult," an official with the provincial transportation department said.

To make the traffic network in PRD more cohesive and effective, more highways are needed. However, building a highway requires developers to go through a large number of procedures. For example, the developers must have their projects registered and authorized by higher-level administrators, including developing and reforming commissions, transportation departments, and land and resource departments.

"No higher authorized coordinative mechanism is existing in the region so far, so it is difficult to call up all cities' representatives to talk about the possibility of integrating land traffic," said Chen Guanghan, a PRD studies professor at Sun Yat-sen University.

The provincial department has delegated lots of powers to the lower-level governments, making the communication more difficult, he added.

(HK Edition 04/21/2008 page2)