March 23 - According to several domestic media outlets, starting today, the Guangzhou Northern Ring Expressway (S15 Shenhai Expressway, Guangzhou Branch) will no longer collect tolls, making the entire Guangzhou Ring Expressway toll-free.
The Guangzhou Northern Ring Expressway was completed and opened to traffic at the end of 1993, and is the first Sino-foreign cooperative expressway and the first ring expressway to be built and opened to traffic in the country.
The Northern Ring Expressway connects core cities such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai, and is one of the expressways with the highest traffic density in the country.
According to statistics, the average daily traffic volume on the Northern Ring Expressway exceeds 420,000 vehicles, with peak traffic exceeding 520,000 vehicles. Among them, the Xunfengzhou Toll Station has an average daily traffic volume of over 100,000 vehicles and ranks 10th in the province in terms of traffic volume.
On December 18, 1993, the Guangzhou Northern Ring Expressway officially opened to traffic, and the queues of vehicles entering and leaving Guangzhou gradually disappeared, with travel time shortened from 1-2 hours to about 20 minutes.
In 1994, French GEA magnetic card charging technology was introduced, which was the first and most advanced set of charging monitoring equipment in the country at that time.
In 2018, mobile payment of tolls was implemented, making it one of the first sections in Guangdong Province to use mobile payment, greatly increasing the speed of toll collection.
By the end of 2023, the intelligent transformation of all eight toll stations along the line will be completed, realizing full coverage of self-service equipment. Vehicles can complete the card withdrawal process in as fast as 3 seconds and complete the entire self-service payment process in 6 seconds through self-service equipment.
