Work of leading road engineer recognized
Sun Lijun is regarded as a role model by many.
This 59-year-old was China's first PhD of road engineering and was promoted to professor at the age of 30 by Tongji University.
His research findings not only led China's urban transportation intelligence, but also solved the problem of a large amount of road material waste.
For his contributions, he was among 10 people to be awarded this year's "most beautiful scientific and technological workers" in Shanghai.
Sun Lijun
Sun is a very forward-thinking person.
He realized as early as the 1990s that for a city such as Shanghai with high dense buildings and limited road facility resources, it would be difficult to solve traffic congestion through facility construction alone. Emerging technologies were required to improve the efficiency of road traffic.
So he led his team to investigate and analyze the characteristics of road networks and traffic behavior in Shanghai's urban areas, resulting in a unique set of new Chinese paradigm in traffic control theories and models. However, the system was large in scale, extremely technical, and had no domestic precedent. This put him in the middle of a heated debate and strong opposition.
Sun and his team, however, did not give up. After several years of hard work, China's first intelligent traffic management system for urban expressways was completed and has been in use for nearly 19 years in Shanghai.
The system has increased the daily capacity of Shanghai's elevated roads to handle and serve traffic volumes by approximately 61 percent and has been extended to about 150 cities throughout the country.
Shanghai Yan'an Elevated Road is a major traffic artery in the city.
Sun said the first-hand field test data from long-term accumulation helped him a lot.
"I grasped the real status of our roads from these first-hand data, which provided a real basis for all future research on theory and applied technology," he said.
He had personally conducted a 5,000-kilometer road condition survey, and collected more than 1 million first-hand pieces of test data.
Sun also led a team that worked on the "asphalt waste material recycling" project.
Annual road maintenance in China generates up to 230 million tons of asphalt waste materials.
Sun and his team established a complete set of asphalt recycling technology around 2005.
The first international high-level bituminous recycling of heavy-duty highways, which he was in charge of, has been in use for 15 years, achieving 100 percent high-value waste material recycling.
