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With its rapid development over the decades, China has developed a growing demand for fast transportation, particularly for expressways, a type of wide road among or within cities that allows for fast driving. The Chinese government has proposed a series of policies that promotes the development of expressways. From the Outline of Building a Strong Transportation Country to the National Comprehensive Three-dimensional Transportation Network Plan, the development goal of fully building an expressway transportation system that satisfies the needs of people and industries was proposed. In October 2022, the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was held and again emphasized the need to accelerate the construction of expressways in China.
Under the great promotion by the government, a large number of expressways have been built in China for the past ten years. According to the statistics of the Ministry of Transport of the People's Republic of China (2021), the mileage scale and construction investment of expressways increased year by year from 2011 to 2021, as shown in Figure 1. By 2021, the mileage of expressways was 169,100 kilometers, and the total construction investment of expressways was 1515.1 billion yuan.
Figure 1. Mileage scale and construction investment of China's expressways in 2011-2021
However, in the great amount of expressway projects in China, there has been found a frequent phenomenon of cost overrun, also known as the “three excesses problems”(Huang, 2011). Since the investment and construction quantity of expressways are very big, the cost overrun can cause severe problems to the civil engineering industry. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent for the personnel in the civil engineering industry and managers of expressway projects to know the influencing factors that cause the cost overrun and take according cost control measures.
Determining how to accurately identify the key influencing factors of expressway construction cost overruns and formulate effective cost control measures is an important issue for construction-related research and practices. For example, Feng et al. (2020) used the risk decomposition structure method to construct a cost risk control index system for East African expressway construction. Mathew et al. (2021) used 118 expressway projects as objects and established a structural equation model to explore the impact relationship and path of project characteristics, project complexity, and delivery risk on project cost growth. Phuong et al. (2020) combined fuzzy set theory and fuzzy clustering analysis and investigated the cost situation of expressway projects under different construction delivery modes based on project characteristics, project complexity, and delivery risk.
Although there has been much research focusing on cost overrun of projects, only a few studies explore the cost overrun of expressway construction in China. These have not explored the issue from a multiple-stakeholders’ perspective. Since the natural environment at the construction sites and the stakeholders in China are different from those in other countries, it is necessary to conduct a systematic analysis for such problems existing in China. In addition, the key influencing factors are usually found through the qualitive analysis based on subjective opinions from expert interviews. A quantitative analysis based on interactions among influencing factors of cost overrun is still missed. Such lack in quantitative analysis negatively affects the accuracy of the analysis of key influencing factors of cost overrun.