Getting to Taipei’s riverside parks is to become easier after a NT$100 million (US$3.3 million) embankment over the Tamsui River (淡水河) levee opens next month, the city government’s Public Works Department said yesterday.
Flood control measures have preserved a band of green space along the city’s rivers.
“Three hundred years ago, Taipei was a lake,” the department’s Hydraulic Engineering Office division head Chang Kai-yao (張凱堯) said. “The low typography means any river overflow could easily flood the city.”
This necessitates a buffer zone of green space bounded by high walls to shield the city from yearly typhoon-induced floods, he said.
However, the walls which shield the city also cut off residents from riverside parks, whose levees only have a few entrance gates, often an hour’s walk apart. There are also no YouBike stations in the parks.
“The electronic system of a YouBike station would be ruined by the parks’ annual floods,” Chang said.
“Therefore, YouBike stations are only set up outside entrance gates, which means that while you can ride into the park, you have to ride out again to return the bike,” he said, adding that the parks run their own separate bike rental system.
To improve access to riverside parks, the city plans to open a new platform embankment over the river levee close to the neck of the Shezidao (社子島) peninsula in Shilin District (士林).
This platform would be the city’s second, building on the success of a similar platform over the river levee next to the city’s Hakka Cultural Park (客家文化主題公園) near Gongguan (公館).
Chang said finding the right combination of space and proximity to city residents would limit the number of platform embankments which could be built in the future.
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