Shortly after the Spring Festival holiday, Shaoxing residents have good news: the city's first underwater lake tunnel — the Pingjiang Road Tunnel, with a total investment of 550 million yuan — has recently been completed and passed preliminary acceptance. The entire tunnel is expected to open to traffic in June this year.
It is understood that the Pingjiang Road Tunnel starts from Pingjiang Road in the south and connects to Paozhong Road in the north. With a total length of 2.1 kilometers, it is the longest tunnel in Shaoxing and the city's first underwater lake tunnel. Construction began in June 2014. The interior of the tunnel has now been fully renovated. The walls are decorated with blue-and-white fiber-reinforced concrete steel cover plates. The tunnel is 5 meters high and can accommodate buses under 4.5 meters in height. At the southern exit, traffic direction signs and height-limit signs have been erected, pointing north to Paozhong Road and Fenglin Road and east to Xishi Mountain Road. On the road surface, lane markings for two-way four-lane traffic have been painted, and speed-limit signs of 50 km/h have been installed. At the northern entrance and exit, traffic direction signs and height-restriction bars have also been built, pointing south to Shengli East Road and Pingjiang Road. The entire tunnel is "hidden" beneath Didang Lake, crossing under the Xiaoyong Railway, Didang Lake and the Second Ring Road North. A relevant official from the Government Project Construction Office of Yuecheng District (High-tech Zone), Shaoxing, said that building the Pingjiang Road Tunnel not only solves the bottleneck problem of north-south traffic in Shaoxing but also well preserves the landscape of Didang Lake.
"Didang Lake is the largest body of water within the Second Ring Road of the main urban area. If a road were built through the middle of the lake, the entire Didang Lake landscape would be destroyed." The tunnel project can fully preserve the continuous lake surface and make the city's water environment more beautiful.
The Pingjiang Road Tunnel is an important node project connecting Paozhong Road and Pingjiang Road, and it is also an important north-south traffic diversion road in Shaoxing's main urban area. Once completed, it will extend north all the way to near the Hangzhou-Ningbo Expressway.