BEIJING - China's expressways will stretch for 73,000 km by the end of this year, the second largest in the world after the United States, Minister of Transport Li Shenglin said in a recent interview.

But despite the network's quick development, the country needs to coordinate the development of various means of transportation to avoid more traffic jams like the astonishing week-long congestion on the Beijing-Tibet Expressway in August this year, he said.

In the past five years, the country built an average of 6,000 km of expressways each year, equal to the total length of expressways in Japan or Italy. The investment on expressways between 2006 and 2010 totaled 2 trillion yuan ($300 billion), he said.