The Freeway Bureau has finished a feasibility study for extending the freeway overpass connecting New Taipei City’s Wugu District (五股) and Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) to Miaoli County.
The feasibility study for constructing an overpass from Yangmei to Miaoli took three years to complete, the agency said yesterday, adding that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications would choose the route that would be used to construct the extension.
The report is being reviewed by the ministry, which would hear opinions from agencies to sort out remaining issues, including where the freeway and the overpass could be connected, if the freeway section in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口) should be straightened and how the construction would bypass a geologically fragile zone.
The extension of the overpass, which is alongside the National Sun Yat-sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1), was proposed by local councilors in 2015 to ease traffic congestion that frequently occurs between Yangmei and Hsinchu during rush hour, as well as on long weekends and major national holidays, the agency said, adding that congestion occurred due to the merger of traffic by local drivers in Hsinchu and those driving past the freeway section in Hsinchu.
If the overpass extension was built from Yangmei to Toufen City (頭份) in Miaoli, an estimated 30 percent of traffic from Freeway No. 1 between Yangmei and Hsinchu could be diverted to the overpass, the bureau said.
The study showed that the proposed overpass extension from Yangmei to Miaoli would be about 39km long, with the estimated construction cost reaching NT$75 billion (US$2.46 billion), and the self-liquidation ratio of the project would be 7.73 percent.
It would take about six years to complete the project, including the time needed to obtain land, the agency said.
The bureau does not propose building additional interchanges between Yangmei and Toufen, it said, adding that it would have to study ways for it to quickly respond to emergencies in that section.
For the extension, the section between Yangmei and Hukou would on the embankment, it said, adding the section between Hukou and Hsinchu would be an overpass.
The section between Hsinchu and Toufen would be constructed by expanding the lanes on Freeway No. 1, it said.
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