Director of Ho Chi Minh City Department of Transport proposes mechanism for corporations to build highways instead of the State

On June 1, at a conference to share experiences with localities in implementing expressway projects, Deputy Minister of Transport Le Dinh Tho said that to achieve the goal of having 3,000km of expressway by 2025, efforts must be made to implement about 1,300km in the next 3 years. This is an extremely large task, so the Government has assigned localities to be the investors of many expressway projects.

There needs to be a general contractor mechanism for highway construction.

At the conference, Mr. Tran Quang Lam, Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Transport, mentioned the management role of state agencies in key transport projects. He said that this was the first time Ho Chi Minh City participated in building an expressway, and the allocated public investment capital accounted for more than 70% of the city's capital.

“So the workload has increased a lot, how can we meet it? We see that we are currently implementing many highway projects, so the Ministry of Transport should evaluate what has been done.

In particular, we should boldly propose mechanisms, for example, implementing the EPC (general contractor) or turnkey contract to promote strong teams of contractors and consultants from key corporations, general companies, and joint ventures to replace the State. We only carry out state management, the State cannot take over everything," Mr. Lam proposed.

In addition, the Director of the HCM City Department of Transport also proposed that in the near future, expressways, including the HCM City Ring Road 3, will collect tolls. The current RFID technology for automatic toll collection is very good, so we should soon move towards not using barriers with appropriate monitoring and penalty mechanisms.

Responding to Mr. Lam's proposal, Deputy Minister Le Dinh Tho said that in terms of investment forms, there needs to be a new mindset. Anything that brings benefits, quality progress, and is suitable but has no regulations yet needs to be consulted for the National Assembly and the Government to promulgate.

Regarding highway toll collection, Mr. Tho said that the Ministry of Transport is collecting opinions to submit to the National Assembly a plan to collect highway tolls invested with the budget.

"We must definitely apply non-stop toll collection (ETC). We also see that ETC toll collection using RFID technology has many advantages. Recently, the Ministry conducted a survey and found that barrier-free toll collection is not difficult when the camera range is further away.

But the key here is to move towards a transportation account for every car owner. That account must be linked to a payment account, which is a mandatory condition.

Once the traffic account is identified, it will not only be applied on highways but also in all areas of the traffic network such as airports, stations, parking lots, and even in apartment buildings. The Ministry is assigning the Department of Roads to urgently research and implement it," Deputy Minister Le Dinh Tho explained.

Land clearance must go one step ahead

Ho Chi Minh City is implementing the Ring Road 3 project, so Director of the City Department of Transport Tran Quang Lam said that in order for this project to start before June 30, it is necessary to focus on site clearance. Ho Chi Minh City identifies site clearance as a bottleneck and has a key meaning in deciding the progress of the project, so this work needs to be paid attention to early, right from the project preparation stage.

Also a locality implementing many expressway projects, Vice Chairman of Hanoi People's Committee Duong Duc Tuan said that in order to clear the land early, for the Ring Road 4 project, Hanoi proposed and was approved by competent authorities to separate the land clearance work into an independent component project.

According to the Ministry of Transport, in 2022, the Government will submit to the National Assembly for approval the investment policy for 6 expressway projects with a total length of about 1,300km and a total investment of nearly 400,000 billion VND, of which about 500km will be assigned to localities for implementation.

The Ministry of Transport and localities are completing procedures to prepare to start construction of about 700km, of which localities will carry out about 400km; arranging capital to deploy about 900km after 2025, of which localities will carry out about 750km.

Source