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Responding to a series of severe traffic crashes that have occurred in less than a month, China's transportation authority ordered local departments on Sunday to make thoroughgoing safety improvements.

At an emergency meeting, Li Shenglin, minister of transport, said that local authorities should place a priority on safety and on ensuring that safe means of transport are available to the public.

The meeting was held in response to a series of road accidents that took place in July. Feng Zhenglin, vice-minister of transport, said at the meeting that nine serious traffic accidents had occurred in less than a month, killing 110 people and injuring 180 others.

According to statistics from the Ministry of Transport, China has seen an unprecedented 85 traffic accidents - each causing at least three deaths - in the first half of the year. The number was up 21.4 percent from what it was in the same period of 2010.

The meeting emphasized that overloaded vehicles, which endanger passengers and tend to damage highways and bridges, will be the main targets of the work to prevent traffic accidents.

On Friday, a fire in a long-distance sleeper bus killed 41 of the 47 passengers onboard. The double-decker, designed to carry 35 passengers, caught fire near the city of Xinyang in Henan province.

An initial investigation speculates that a passenger had come on board with flammable materials or explosives and that those things had started the blaze. Supervisors said the fire's quick spread made it difficult for the passengers to escape.

Earlier in the week, a rigid frame 230-meter bridge in Beijing's Huairou district crumbled when a truck carrying 145 tons of sand drove onto it. The bridge was designed to hold vehicles weighing a maximum of 55 tons.

It was the fourth bridge to collapse this month and the second to be felled by an overloaded vehicle.

At the meeting on Sunday, Feng called on local traffic authorities to strictly follow the new Regulation on the Protection of Road Safety, which came into effect earlier this month.

The regulation increased the penalties imposed on drivers caught behind the wheel of overloaded cars or trucks.

Roads in China have long groaned under the weight of overloaded vehicles, Zhang Changqing, a law expert of Beijing Jiaotong University, told China Daily.

"Drivers and shipping companies have little sense of how much damage overweight vehicles can inflict on roads and bridges," Zhang said, adding that China is not as capable of maintaining roads as are other countries.

Zhang called for the stricter punishments to be imposed not only on drivers of overloaded vehicles but also on shipping companies and the owners of cargo that are involved in such cases.

The ministry said long-distance buses should be equipped with global positioning systems and surveillance cameras.

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