8 lane highway good for business bad for the rustic appeal that part of Thailand has. You can get lost in natural beauty of all those miles between Kanchanburi and the border.

^ Sidetracks and back roads will still remain.

I suspect that it is a Chinese funded route for mineral laden trucks.

^ Sidetracks and back roads will still remain.

I suspect that it is a Chinese funded route for mineral laden trucks.

No, actually it is a well publicized project that Italian-Thai was supposed to carry out, which is the contractor that won the contract to build SE Asia's largest port (and possibly one of the world's largest) - an integrated deep sea port near Maungmagan beach outside Dawei, estimated to be 10 times larger than Laem Chabang in Thailand. The idea behind the project is to greatly reduce transit times around the precarious strait of Malacca, which is also home to quite a few pirates. Freight heading to/from Europe, the Middle East and Africa would thus be able to reach it's intended SE Asian destinations (including Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and possibly even Southern China) much more quickly, and vice versa. Along with the supporting road infrastructure which eventually calls for an expressway all the way from Bangkok as I've mentioned already, the port is supposed to become home to numerous industries that due to environmental concerns back home and lower labor costs would be moved from Thailand to Myanmar. Many of the firms operating there would be Thai firms.

However, due to the Thai political crisis and funding problems, the future of the project looks uncertain, especially since China doesn't seem to be interested (too far away from China and besides, the supporting infrastructure is to link up with Bangkok, not China) and while Japan is being swayed, they are more interested in the Thillwina or whatever it's called industrial park near Yangon.