The future of the Suhua Freeway was up in the air yesterday after a previously absent government representative told the review committee that the Cabinet had recently fine-tuned an Outline for Sustainable Development of the East that would not favor construction of the controversial route connecting Hualien and Ilan.
Under the outline, infrastructure on the east coast would rely mainly on rail, while roads would be developed as supplementary transportation routes, vice chairman of the Council for Economic Planning and Development (CEPD) Chang Ching-sen (張景森) said, throwing into doubt the project that environmentalists feared was destined to proceed.
The outline was proposed last March, while the details were only finalized on Monday, he said.
Chang represented the government on the Suhua case committee, but he had rarely appeared at previous meetings.
His statement yesterday, however, came as a “bomb dropped upon the laps of other case committee members,” who were mostly academics and experts in environmental sciences.
Although Chang denied suggestions that this was a result of a directive from President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), many Chinese-language media have seen it otherwise.
Since by law a Cabinet decision supersedes the Environmental Protection Administration’s authority, the Suhua case committee members lambasted the Cabinet for keeping them in the dark, “misleading them and fooling them” when their decision may not even matter in the end.
“As a responsible member of the Suhua case committee [Chang] should have said something earlier — most members feel they have been tricked,” one committee member said.
In addition to the outline, Chang expressed what he said was his “personal opinion” as to why the freeway plan should be rejected.
“With sustainable development of the east in mind, whether the Suhua Freeway is the best plan for development is debatable,” Chang said.
“Secondly, according to a Ministry of Transportation and Communications analysis, if the freeway is built, traffic congestion in the east would worsen because of an increase in traffic flow, particularly at Hsuehshan Tunnel [雪山隧道], where its service standard was predicted to plummet to grade F,” he said.
The freeway could fail to reduce travel time to Hualien, he said.
Moreover, Chang said that the initial price tag for the freeway, put at NT$93 billion (US$3 billion), had ballooned to NT$129.5 billion because of inflation in the cost of raw materials, making the cost-efficiency of the freeway questionable.
Last but not least, “although the Suhua Freeway was a policy of President Chen, at this stage the Cabinet should not make any big decisions — the new government should be given space to rethink the case,” he said.
In response to criticism from other case committee members, Chang denied that the outline had been developed “in the dark.”
“The outline had been publicized since last year, the details were just finalized on Monday,” he said.
Regardless of the new twist in the story, yesterday the committee sent the case over to the environmental impact assessment meeting “since it was in accordance with procedure.” Supplementary information, including the fine print of the outline, would be distributed to committee members before then, for them to determine its impact on the Suhua case.
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