The Keelung City Government yesterday vowed to press on with the Keelung light rail project with the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) and the Taipei City Government, adding that the three agencies have reached an agreement on the importance of having the flexibility of extending the railway lines further into downtown Keelung and Taipei.
The meeting, hosted by the Keelung City Government, was convened to ease tensions between the Taipei City Government and the ministry, after the former accused the latter of planning the project without negotiating with it first and asked that the terminal station in Taipei be extended from the Nangang Exhibition Center Station to the Nangang Railway Station.
The Taipei City Government argued that the Nangang Railway Station, which serves the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) system, the High Speed Rail system and Taipei MRT System, is the center of the city’s East District Gateway Project.
Apart from the necessity of extending the railway line to Nangang Railway Station, Taipei also asked that the extension be built underground, instead of at ground-level, to avoid disrupting traffic.
However, the ministry favors building the light rail route at ground-level and has said that extending the light rail route from the Nangang Exhibition Center Station to the Nangang Railway Station — a distance of about 1km — would require an additional budget of NT$5 billion (US$165.5 million).
If the light rail system ends at the Nangang Exhibition Center, light rail commuters can easily switch to the MRT Wenhu Line (Brown Line) and Bannan Line (Blue Line), the ministry added.
Speaking after the three-way meeting yesterday, Keelung Mayor Lin Yu-chang (林右昌) said that the three government agencies reaffirmed support for the light rail project and vowed to proceed with its construction.
“The Keelung light rail system would link the East District Gateway Project and the Keelung International Cruise Ship Home Port Project, which would help develop the Keelung River valley corridor and the northern Wudu area (五堵北),” he said.
Although the terminal stations of the light rail system are currently set at the TRA’s Keelung Railway Station and the Nangang Exhibition Center Station, Lin said that all three agencies agreed to make further extension of the line a common goal.
In addition to the extension to Nangang Station, Lin said they agreed to extend the light rail system from the Keelung Railway Station to the west side of Keelung Port.
The three parties are scheduled to meet again at the end of this month to discuss the possibility of including construction of two proposed extension routes in the first stage of the project, Railway Reconstruction Bureau Secretary-General Wen Tai-hsin (溫代欣) said, adding that the light rail project was designed to have the flexibility to accommodate further expansions.
The Keelung City Government’s proposed extension of the light rail route is about 700m-long and used to be a corridor for the military transport railway line, Wen said.
Land expropriation should not an issue for the proposed extensions from the Keelung Railway Station and from the Nangang Exhibition Center because most of the properties along the route are owned by the government, he added.
It would take about two-and-a-half years to build an underground route connecting the Nangang Exhibition Center and Nangang Station, as opposed to one year if the route is built at the ground level, Wen said.
Building an underground route would also be more expensive and complicated, as construction would involve removing utility lines installed along the section, he said.
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