Motorists using scenic road now have to pay toll
Print Edition
A local government in north China’s Hebei Province is under fire after it started charging drivers and their passengers to travel along a road known for its scenery.
From May 1, each driver and passenger will be charged 50 yuan (US$7.70) to use the road connecting the prairie area of Zhangbei County and Chongli, a ski venue for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, in the city of Zhangjiakou.
“The fee, based on the cost of cleaning, infrastructure construction and maintenance, is collected to better protect the environment,” said the Zhangbei government in a written statement earlier this week.
Local residents and workers will not be charged.
Chinese law forbids tolls for roads other than expressways, but the Zhangbei government says the 50 yuan is a sightseeing admission charge, not a toll.
The Zhangjiakou government formally classified the road and its surroundings as a tourist resort on March 25, and Zhangbei held a hearing to discuss the charge on April 29, according to the statement.
In Chinese, the road is known as Caoyuantianlu, which translates as “the prairie road to paradise.”
Stretching 132km, it has attracted a lot of sightseers over the past few years as stunning landscape photos taken from the road have attracted attention on the Internet.
According to official statistics, the road saw 330,000 drivers and passengers last year, and up to 6,000 vehicles a day in peak season.
Local residents have often had to put up with traffic jams, littering and damaged grassland, but Zhangbei, officially classified by China’s central government as a “poverty-stricken county,” cannot afford to maintain the road and develop it for tourists. Those costs run to millions of yuan every year, said Guo Zhiwei, deputy head of the county.
Despite the problems caused by the sightseers, many residents would rather the government stop charging the fee, as it has limited the number of visitors and therefore reduced income from tourism.
Zhang Guo owns a guest house in Yehuling Village, near the start of the road in Zhangbei. He said May to October is the peak tourism season for the area, but his guesthouse has only had 10 bookings this month.
Zhang spent 200,000 yuan opening the inn with 12 rooms and a restaurant last year. “The rooms were full during weekends and holidays from last July to September,” he recalled.
Zhang said other villagers had opened guest houses, with investments up to 1 million yuan, but the admission fee has turned many tourists away, affecting their businesses.
Local media reported that about a third of vehicles did a U-turn in front of the toll gate during the May Day holiday.
Guo would neither confirm nor deny that, only disclosing that 7,000 people paid to access the road in the three days.
Liu Simin, a tourism expert with the China Society for Future Studies, said the charge is understandable for an impoverished county, but advised the government to keep the price low to balance short-term financial shortages with long-term demand for development.
“Too high a price will eventually hurt the tourism business,” Liu said.
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