The Guangdong Provincial People's Congress recently adopted a road regulation, which explicitly spells out the date on which road tolls will be scrapped.

Of the world's 140,000 km of toll roads, 100,000 km are in China. Since some toll roads serve as a channel for operators to grab huge profits, it's no mean feat to annul these cash cows.

Take the Beijing section of the Beijing-Shijiazhuang Highway for example. Although the road has already produced more than 600 million yuan ($86 million) in profits, toll charges continue, even after lawmakers proposed to cancel tolls in this section and local residents filed lawsuits.

The whole society has realized the many problems resulting from road tolls and realized it's time to eliminate them from the country's road network. Roads are supposed to be public welfare facilities and after three decades of fast economic growth, it's reasonable to let the public enjoy development fruits, instead of continuing to pound their purses.

The priority now is to audit the revenues of every tollbooth and to set a time limit on those yet to recover construction costs.

Qianjiang Evening News

House Price Smoke Screen

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, as a result of the current macroeconomic situation, state policies and market demand, the uptrend in housing prices is expected to turn into a downtrend.

Indeed, after the state tightened housing mortgage requirements last year, some cities saw a cessation in price hikes and even saw prices fall. But does this really mean the end of the windfall profit era of the property sector?

The housing price decline is only happening in a small number of cities, while exorbitant profiteering covers the entire industry. In the first half of 2008, 70 big and medium-sized cities saw an average increase of 10.2 percent in housing prices year on year.

In the past decade, in some cities, housing prices had been skyrocketing. So although the price is falling in cities like Shenzhen, it represents just a correction instead of the end of the era of big profits.

Current housing prices are unaffordable to salaried people. Therefore, most homebuyers are slipping into the terrible situation of becoming slaves to their mortgages. Can we then really claim that the era of big profits is over?

Beneficiaries of the huge profits are not limited to property developers and speculators. In some cases, half of the profits from real estate development go to local governments. Therefore, as long as local governments refuse to give up some of these profits, we will never see the end of this vicious circle.

Qilu Evening News

Governor Mr. Fixit

Central China's Jiangxi Province recently made the phone numbers of provincial governors, vice governors and the mayor of its capital city available to the public, so as to allow public complaints to go directly to the seat of power.

After several long-standing problems were solved by dialing the number of the provincial governor's mobile phone, a flood of over 2,000 calls were logged and two cellphones have reportedly been rendered unusable.

This is exciting news, but it also reflects a serious problem: The public prefers to rely on individual efficient officials to solve problems, rather than existing administrative and legal systems. It also implies that the current petition system needs to be greatly improved.

The public's passion for using the governor's phone number should mark the start of the establishment of a mechanism that effectively helps the public express their complaints. When the people begin to lose interest in this number and turn to relevant government departments for solutions, then everything is really working well.

The Beijing News