Space crunch? More roads may be built underground

[Darthrevan]

Singapore's Central Business District, new Marina Bay Downtown and its future southern waterfront district may be linked by an extensive underground road network beyond 2030.

SINGAPORE'S Central Business District, new Marina Bay Downtown and its future southern waterfront district may be linked by an extensive underground road network beyond 2030.

The plan being studied by the Land Transport Authority (LTA) will see traffic zipping about unobtrusively beneath the surface in a series of subterranean ring roads.

Such roads, which free up surface space and improve the liveability of urban areas, are found in cities such as Brussels, Stockholm, Madrid, Paris, Hamburg and Boston.

Singapore's plan is seen as part of a larger one to accommodate a growing population, and it dates back to the 1980s.

Then in 1996, the LTA envisioned 30km of two- to four-lane roads forming a pair of concentric rings under the city centre.

It revisited the idea in the recently released 2013 Land Transport Masterplan, but added that the so-called Singapore Underground Road System (Surs) will now be more extensive.

"We are now studying how Surs can serve new developments in the Marina Bay area and the new southern waterfront city that will extend from Keppel Channel to Pasir Panjang Terminal," a spokesman said.

But until exact development plans for these two districts are clearer, he said, the scale and alignment of the underground roads remain conceptual.

Experts said going underground is inevitable.

Dr Park Byung Joon, head of the urban transport management programme at SIM University, said intense development is expected for the new downtown areas. Thus, building roads on the surface "may not be desirable due to the limited supply of land".

Elevated roads may also mar the visual appeal and perceived prestige of a district, he said. Noise is another consideration.

"The only option left is an underground road network," he said.

He noted that it will be very expensive to build, but the benefits may be justifiable.

Observers said the long gestation of such a network - at least 50 years from concept to implementation - held a high cost, as many areas in the city had to be "safeguarded". The term refers to reserving space for a major infrastructure project to avoid conflicting demands in the future.

But retired traffic engineer Joseph Yee, 68, who was involved in early Surs studies, said: "The cost of not safeguarding is higher."

Safeguarding ensures that property acquisition is kept to a minimum, for instance.

Going underground is not entirely new to Singapore. The 12km Kallang-Paya Lebar Expressway, which opened in 2008, is largely underground. The Marina Coastal Expressway, slated to open by the year end, is the first to have a stretch going under the seabed.

Source: http://www.straitstimes.com/breaking-news/singapore/story/more-roads-be-built-underground-lta-studying-plan-build-subterranean-r

[Soya]

radx will feel right at home......

[Baal]

" it will be very expensive to build, but the benefits may be justifiable."

 

6 figure COE has been justified. CAT A 90+ / CAT B 11X+......

[Mustank]

He noted that it will be very expensive to build, but the benefits may be justifiable.

[ youtube] ETxmCCsMoD0 [ /youtube]

sianzzz

donno how to do

Edited October 16, 2013 by Mustank

[Shull]

 

He noted that it will be very expensive to build, but the benefits may be justifiable.

[ youtube] ETxmCCsMoD0 [ /youtube]

sianzzz

donno how to do

 

 

[Chickenfarm]

Our population is slated to increase to a projected figure in the coming years...

 

Construction of buildings has been intensive.

 

But our infrastructure such as drainage and stuff remained the same. And there is ponding whenever a heavy rain struck us once in 50 years...

 

So of course it is going to be justifiable...how else to accommodate the influx without the necessary infrasturcture to house the same?

[Knoobie]

Hopefully they dig deeper and leave the long kangs alone this time... Otherwise our Garden by the bay become Padi Field by the bay...

[Kangadrool]

The cheapest and most environmentally friendly way is to reduce the overcrowding population.

[Watwheels]

Cantonese have a saying, "catch worm put into anus".

 

In other words backside itchy. Causing disruptions to traffic and probably residential & businesses. Is it really "worth" it? High cost is only one issue.

[Mockngbrd]

[Magentis_Ray]

[Mockngbrd]

Here we go:
http://gizmodo.com/an-artificial-cave-200-beneath-central-park-with-micha-1446538828

[RadX]

radx will feel right at home......

 

 

oi! crowded lah, i gotta go deeper....

Here we go:

http://gizmodo.com/an-artificial-cave-200-beneath-central-park-with-micha-1446538828

 

 

they shd study how the durg lords did an underground tunnel and nobody knows location etc...hahaha

[Knoobie]

The cheapest and most environmentally friendly way is to reduce the overcrowding population.

But they read the cheapest = lighter wallet for them :(

[Duckduck]

woohoo even more rich poor gap... rich continue 2 pay higher n higher ERP above ground, poor no see daylight kena funnelled downstairs lol...

 

then tourist come here will say:" wah all lambos n supercars, SG dun have poor pple one... "

[DavidOh]

Update on 23rd Sep 2014

 

 

NYC Park to Singapore Labs Go Underground in Space Hunt: Cities
2014-09-23 21:01:00.1 GMT



By Flavia Krause-Jackson, Kati Pohjanpalo and Sharon Chen
Sept. 24 (Bloomberg) --

 

Cities from arctic Helsinki to
equatorial Singapore are exploring the benefits of expanding
toward the center of the earth.
Crowds, weather, expensive real estate and vulnerability to
climate change are prompting urban planners to turn their eye to
the potential of usable spaces below street level.
From an underground park in a forgotten century-old trolley
terminal in Manhattan to Mexico City’s inverted 300-meter
underground pyramid -- called the Earthscraper -- architects are
re-imagining spaces for people and not just infrastructure in
cities of the future.
“There are real opportunities to develop underground to
accommodate density for cities that are already overcrowded or
growing,” said Clara Irazábal, assistant professor at the
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at
Columbia University, New York. “It can expand efficiency,
reduce commuting times and improve quality of life.”
Singapore is planning a 20-hectare (49 acres) subterranean
labyrinth that could house as many as 4,200 scientists and
researchers in soundproof labs and data centers carved out of
caves, according to JTC Corp., a property developer that
commissioned a feasibility study on the project.
The city-state opened the first underground oil-storage
facility in southeast Asia this month, freeing space three times
the size of New York’s Grand Central Station for chemical
manufacturing above ground. The project caps a 30-year effort to
create a petrochemical hub. It began when officials merged seven
offshore islets and then spent S$950 million ($749 million) to
dig rock caverns that can hold enough liquid hydrocarbon to fill
600 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

‘Looked Down’

“When we ran out of room, we looked down,” said Yeoh Keat
Chuan, managing director of the Singapore Economic Development
Board. “We had to find creative ways to find space.”
With a population of 5.4 million, Singapore has the same
number of inhabitants as Finland packed in a fraction of the
land. Its skyline is already clotted with more than 4,000 high-
rises. Yet, cities studying underground development could look
to the Finns, who have been doing it since they began building
shelters against Russian bombardment in the 1940s.
Dubbed the daughter of the Baltic, Helsinki is surrounded
by water on three sides and lies on a granite bedrock that lends
itself to sturdy construction. Pasi Aarnio, a development
manager at builder YIT Oyj, compared Helsinki below street level
to a “Swiss cheese.” Down below, there are rail tunnel and
service passages for power lines and heating, as well as 20
parking facilities and two bus stations.

Courts, Pools

There is also human life bubbling 10 meters to 20 meters
below, from walkways and malls to badminton courts and a kids’
playground to an ice-hockey rink and a 50-meter swimming pool.
“It’s a whole other world down there,” Eija Kivilaakso,
one of the urban planners behind a 2010 master blueprint to map
underground spaces.
The city’s wastewater-treatment plant operates underground;
for more than three decades, Helsinki has drawn its drinking
water from Finland’s second-biggest lake, Paeijaenne, through a
75-mile long tunnel.
It doesn’t stop there. Frosty sea water is funneled via
tunnels to an old bomb shelter underneath a 19th-century
Christian Orthodox cathedral, where it’s used to cool the
computer servers of a 2,900 square-foot data center built
underneath the tourist site. Heat generated by the center, run
by Telecity Group Plc, is channeled to warm about 500 homes.

30 Meters

A sea fortress, situated on an island 15 minutes by boat
from the city’s south harbor, is reachable via a maintenance
tunnel also used by ambulances.
“There are so many tunnels that finding the space below
ground can be difficult,” said Aarnio. “It’s getting full to
about 30 meters down. Below 30 meters, there’s more space.”
Rising Asian megacities take note: Helsinki officials are
planning to divert traffic via subterranean passages for trucks
serving city-center stores.
Authorities in Beijing already have something to work with,
thanks to Mao Zedong. He ordered the construction of an entire
second city when tensions ran high with the Russians in the late
1960s. When the much-feared nuclear blowout didn’t come to pass,
the network fell into obscurity and disrepair.
Many U.S. cities, locked into a car culture, have tunnel
vision when it comes to moving more of their transit, utilities
and water structures below the surface, according to Nasri
Munfah, head of underground projects for Kansas City-based HNTB
Corp., a civil-engineering consulting firm.

‘No-Brainer’

“It’s a no-brainer that at the rate at which Americans are
fleeing rural towns and flocking to cities, developing
underground structures is the logical thing to do to make these
cities bearable and sustainable,” he said.
In Montreal, where the average low temperature in January
is minus 14 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit), there’s a
19-mile (31 kilometers) underground pedestrian network
connecting 30 cinemas, 200 restaurants and almost 2,000 shops
accessible via 20 outdoor exits and 10 metro stations.
It doesn’t always work as planned. In the case of Atlanta,
Civil War-era underground structures that doubled as speakeasies
during the Prohibition were transformed in 1969 into an
entertainment district with bars like “Scarlet O’Hara” to lure
people downtown. Yet the novelty soon wore off, crime came in
and the “city beneath the city” instead became a costly white
elephant that was put up for sale.
Humanity’s yearning to build below the ground can be traced
back millenia, with the most notable ruins in modern-day Turkey
across a lunar Anatolian landscape.

Turkish Labyrinth

The archaeological complex of Derinkuyu in Cappadocia is a
vast labyrinth of caves and tunnels that give a flavor of what
was once, probably in the Bronze Age, an entire underground city
of as many as 50,000 people with evidence of bedrooms, kitchens,
chapels -- even a wine press and stable for horses.
Underground realms have captured the imagination of
writers, from Jules Verne’s classic “Journey to the Center of
the Earth” to the science-fiction series “City of Ember.”
One of New York’s biggest draws is the High Line, an
elevated park built on 1.5 miles of disused railroad tracks
running along the West Side. That inspired a Kickstarter
campaign to create the Lowline, which would convert a rail site
in the Lower East Side into a park using fiber-optic tubes to
channel sunlight below ground. It raised more than $150,000, a
third more than the target, by April 2012.

‘Natural Light’

Futuristic scenarios aside, there are limits to staying
cooped underground.
“People need some exposure to natural light and natural
ventilation to maintain their health,” said Irazábal.
Underground is also an expensive proposition, nearly five
times the cost of construction above ground, according to Amy
Huanqing Li, who wrote her PhD on underground urbanization at
the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
Part of the reason U.S. cities are laggards in underground
development is the lack of government spending at the federal,
state and local levels, IBSWorld’s Diment said. Boston’s “Big
Dig,” the most expensive U.S. highway initiative on record,
which included the relocation of 29 miles of utility lines below
ground cost almost $25 billion -- more than the Channel tunnel
connecting the U.K. to France.
Money is not something Singapore -- the world’s third-
richest country per capita -- has to worry about.
At the Sept. 2 opening of Jurong Rock Caverns, Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong recounted a meeting he had with the
board of Halliburton Co. two months earlier where he was asked
how Singapore would expand its physical land area to accommodate
the world’s biggest provider of oilfield services.
His answer: “There is a theoretical limit, but with
ingenuity and determination and technology, that limit can be
quite a way off.”

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[Rncw]

yah...put all roads underground so they can put more ERPs....

[Mockngbrd]

Underground geylang? The lower you go the more kinky it gets?

Edited September 24, 2014 by Mockngbrd