Tainan residents and environmentalists yesterday gathered in front of the Ministry of the Interior headquarters in Taipei to oppose a proposed expressway project in Tainan’s Sigang District (西港), which they said involved faulty traffic impact assessments and inappropriate land seizures.
The Tainan City Government has proposed building a NT$261 million (US$7.89 million) 1.8km ring road east of Sigang’s Highway No. 19 — which connects Sigang with downtown Tainan — to ease rush-hour congestion.
The project would see the expropriation of 99 private properties, as well as farmland owned by the state-run Taiwan Sugar Co, which protesters said would damage the area’s environment.
Self-help organization leader Cheng Tun-che (鄭敦哲) questioned the necessity of the project ahead of the project’s expropriation review, saying there is no congestion on Highway No. 19, and the ring road would cause congestion on a bridge linking Sigang with downtown areas.
The city government’s traffic impact assessment report is flawed, as it purposefully overestimated the traffic volume on Highway No. 19 to create a false need, Cheng said.
“How could the government seize private properties according to a false traffic impact assessment? We suspect the city government fabricated the assessment,” he said.
Later, the review panel decided that the Tainan City Government should reassess the cause of the congestion and review alternative solutions other than the ring road.
Later in the day, another group of environmentalists gathered in front of the headquarters to protest a planned expansion of the Central Taiwan Science Park in Taichung — which was approved in February — ahead of the Environmental Protection Administration’s environmental impact assessment grand assembly, which was expected to give formal consent to a revised proposal of the project.
Holding up jars full of air they said they had collected from various areas in Taichung, protesters said the samples gathered from around the science park were dirtier than others, and the expansion project would only contribute to local air pollution, which they said is so bad that the city has the highest occurrence rate of lung cancer in the nation.
There is no transparency in the science park’s emissions monitoring and management process, while the members of the park’s oversight committee are appointed by the park’s management, clean air campaigner Hsu Hsin-hsin (許欣欣) said.
“The park is like an enclave in the city, and the city government does not have the slightest idea of what is going on in the park,” she said.
They demanded the expansion project be halted and environmental groups be included in the oversight committee.
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