Ministry of Transportation and Communications officials are to meet with the mayors of Taipei, New Taipei City and Keelung today to discuss the possibility of upgrading a proposed light rail system for Keelung to connect it with a Taipei MRT line.
The ministry and the Keelung City Government have since 2017 been planning to build a light rail system to connect the city to Taipei via New Taipei City.
However, no significant progress has been made, as local officials have yet to agree on the terminal stations of the light rail system.
The project also drew criticism from people commuting between Taipei and Keelung, as the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) has said that its service would bypass the Keelung Railway Station once the light rail system is built.
To resolve the disputes, Lin on Sunday said that the ministry would convene local officials to facilitate dialogue on the railway policy issues affecting them.
“In the past, we mainly talked about the light rail system as a point-to-point transport system. We would now re-evaluate the system from the perspective of spatial planning and would propose to upgrade it to an MRT line, making it part of the railway network surrounding the nation’s capital,” Lin said yesterday, adding that the benefits of an MRT line would be far greater than those of a light rail system.
An MRT line that connects Taipei and Keelung would not only further boost the development of Keelung, but would also be integrated with the planned Minsheng-Sijhih MRT line and converge with a planned high-speed rail extension line connecting Taipei and Yilan, Lin said.
The TRA’s capacity in the northern corridor has been restricted due to a “bottleneck section” between Keelung’s Cidu District (七堵) and New Taipei City’s Shulin District (樹林), and a Taipei-Keelung MRT line would help expand the railway transport capacity in the corridor, Lin said.
It would also facilitate transportation to Yilan and Taoyuan, he added.
Taipei Rapid Transit Corp is planning the construction of the Minsheng-Sijhih line, which would link Taipei’s Datong (大同), Zhongshan (中山), Songshan (松山) and Neihu (內湖) districts as well as New Taipei City’s Sijhih District (汐止). The high-speed rail extension line to Yilan, on the other hand, is to be planned and built by the ministry’s Railway Bureau.
Separately, Lin said the ministry has submitted to the Executive Yuan its master plan for an electrified dual-track railway line between Hualien and Taitung.
The project still needs to undergo an environmental impact review at the Environmental Protection Administration, he said.
The electrification of the South Link Line (南迴鐵路) would be completed by the end of this year, which is key in developing a railway system around Taiwan, Lin said.
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