On October 11, construction officially began on the Yibin Xinshi-Panzhihua Riverside Expressway in Sichuan, with an estimated investment of 88.6 billion yuan, making it the largest single expressway project in China by investment scale to date.
The expressway has a total length of 452 kilometers and a cost of nearly 200 million yuan per kilometer. The main line starts at the Xinshi section of the G4216 Renshou-Muchuan-Xinshi segment, passes through Leibo, Jinyang, Ningnan, Huili, and Huidong counties in Liangshan Prefecture, and ends at the Jinjiang interchange of the G5 Beijing-Kunming Expressway on the east side of Panzhihua, connecting with the completed G4216 Panzhihua-Lijiang Expressway.
This riverside expressway is mainly laid out along the Jinsha River corridor, where geological hazards such as debris flows, landslides, and dangerous rock collapses occur frequently. The bridge-tunnel ratio along the entire line is as high as 82.5%, with tunnels accounting for 55% (132 tunnels, totaling about 238 kilometers). This not only makes construction difficult and high-risk, but also brings high operational safety risks and high operation and maintenance costs.