In the land south of the colorful clouds, extending rural roads resemble silver ribbons stringing pearls into chains, weaving a blissful picture of rural revitalization. “We developed a digital management and maintenance platform for rural roads, driving a digital transformation in rural road management. The time spent on grassroots data reporting has been reduced from an average of four hours per day to one hour, eliminating the ‘marathon’ of paperwork at its source,” a relevant official from the Yunnan Provincial Highway Bureau told reporters. The digital management platform has established a data system of “one source for one data, shared across the entire domain,” covering digital modules such as digital road networks, fund management, and road condition records.
Recently, the General Office of the Yunnan Provincial Committee of the Communist Party of China announced the first batch of advanced models for reducing burdens and improving efficiency in 2025, with the Yunnan Provincial Highway Bureau being selected. In recent years, the Party Committee of the Yunnan Provincial Highway Bureau has aimed to “combat formalism and reduce burdens on the grassroots,” focusing on pain points in rural road management such as “duplicate reporting, cumbersome inspections, and rough decision-making.” By implementing digital management and maintenance, intelligent verification, and online evaluations, they have effectively achieved the “three reductions” in data reporting, on-site verification, and preparation for inspections, as well as the “three improvements” in work efficiency, fund disbursement rates, and road condition quality. This ensures that data does the running while the grassroots do less legwork.
Digital Image Library Enables Visual Management
“A total of 1,771 real-scene images have been collected for the 18.68-kilometer county road Xiaoyong Line, with overall road quality rated as good—15.68 kilometers classified as excellent and 3 kilometers as good,” Luo Weihong, deputy section chief of the Local Road Management Section of the Zhaotong City Zhaoyang District Transportation Bureau, explained to reporters while pointing at the screen. “Through this platform, we can view images from any stake number, making road condition inspections incredibly convenient!”
In recent years, Yunnan has strengthened visual management of its road network by building a digital image library within the digital management platform, covering 3 million images of 300,000 kilometers of rural roads—akin to creating “archived health reports” for rural roads. Xu Lei, deputy director of the Rural Highway Division of the Yunnan Provincial Highway Bureau, noted that through the digital platform, the time required for grassroots staff to verify road conditions on any route has been reduced from 16 hours to 3 hours, significantly improving work efficiency.
In fund management, Yunnan has established an electronic voucher repository using AI recognition technology, automating the entire process of voucher entry and verification, eliminating the need to dispatch personnel to the grassroots to review vouchers. As of July, the platform has processed 14,900 payment vouchers with an accuracy rate of 99.5%.
Optimized Evaluation System Reduces Burdens on Grassroots
By the end of 2024, Yunnan’s total highway mileage reached 340,000 kilometers, including 10,800 kilometers of expressways and 302,000 kilometers of rural roads—ranking second in the country for both categories. This places significant pressure on highway project supervision and long-term maintenance.
Yunnan has innovated its project verification mechanism by creating a “Rural Highway Construction Project Verification Management System,” establishing a new supervision model of “online management and mobile verification.” This extends management terminals to project sites, enabling “cloud-speed processing.”
Leveraging mobile image capture and AI intelligent analysis technology, provincial and municipal transportation authorities rarely need to visit project sites, conducting verifications online instead. Grassroots staff upload key node images via a mobile app, and the system automatically links the project’s GIS coordinates and compares project completion status. As of July, Yunnan has verified 12,900 kilometers of rural road reconstruction projects, 5,300 kilometers of safety and life protection projects, and 1,393 old and hazardous bridge renovations online.
To effectively reduce burdens on the grassroots, Yunnan optimized its rural road maintenance evaluation system, shifting from traditional on-site assessments involving nine major categories and 23 sub-indicators to an online evaluation system with three modules (maintenance level, maintenance tasks, and fund management) and nine sub-indicators. This efficiently completed performance evaluations for rural road maintenance across 129 counties (cities, districts) in the province, greatly improving evaluation efficiency. In the first half of this year, the rural road maintenance fund disbursement rate rose to 78.96%, and the rate of good-to-medium-quality roads increased to 89.86%.
