By Li Yanhui
City road signs are being revamped and renamed as part of a nationwide clarity campaign starting this month and ending by August 1.
The project involves five expressways and 176 urban roads, repasting more than 900 old signs and replacing more than 900 at a cost of 4 million yuan ($585,887). Some 85 to 90 percent of old road signs will simply be fixed by pasting on new signs.
The Ministry of Transport wrote the new naming rules for national expressways in 2007 and implemented them last year in other cities and provinces. The project involves 37 national expressways and a total length of 85,000 kilometers, a distance of more than twice around the planet.
Some have queried the cost.
Shanghai spent 200 million yuan ($29 million) on 25,000 new road signs, according to the Shanghai Evening Post.
"If the 25,000 road sign report is correct, then 8,000 yuan ($1,172) for each road sign is still a good deal for the businessman," wrote Han Han, China's most famous blogger.
The standardization of expressway names was good for management and memorizing in the future, according to a Beijing Transport Commission press release.
The previous names had created confusion, he explained: the Beijing-Tibet Expressway for example started out as the Badaling Expressway then became the Beijing-Changping Expressway then the Beijing- Zhangjiakou Expressway, the Dandong-Lhasa, Hohhot-Jining Expressway and even the Hohhot-Baotou Expressway.
Sixty percent of Net users were confused by the new road signs, according to a Xinmin. cn poll.
"The renaming of the expressways will not only bring trouble to new drivers who rely heavily on GPS, but also bring big trouble to skillful drivers," said Jacky Xia of the Beijing Eagle Society, a 400-member car club.
"Perhaps people need two years or more to adapt to the changes."
Old customers can come and upgrade their GPS sets for free said a staff member at Careland, a Shenzhen GPS manufacturer.
An update will take time and money and most GPS suppliers are not ready to install the new road signs, according to the Beijing Youth Daily.
Although still using Chinese characters, expressway names will now have bigger English letters and Arabic numerals. For example, the Badaling Expressway will be replaced by G6 Beijing-Tibet Highway.
"Before the renaming, I just needed to know my departure point and destination," Net user Chunyise of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province was quoted by Beijing Youth Daily.
"But now I have to remember so many letters and numbers and cannot find any familiar names of the road."