Yangtze River Tunnel – A Project Of E&C ... - Roof & Facade

TRANSPORTATION
New Generation Railways:
Meeting Southeast Asia’s
Transport Challenges
Rehabilitation of existing
railways, and expansion through
new and state-of-the-art systems
may well be critical to
ensuring not simply efficient
transport links to domestic and
foreign markets and suppliers for
industry, but also in order to
avoid rising fuel prices (jet fuel
as well as gasoline), and reducing
otherwise choking road
traffic congestion, and polluting
climate change damaging carbon
dioxide emissions from vehicle
and aeroplane exhausts
By Andrew Symon
RAILWAYS promise to be at least one
answer to Southeast Asia’s transport challenges
in the coming century.
Rehabilitation of existing railways, and
expansion through new and state of the art
systems may well be critical to ensuring
not simply efficient transport links to domestic
and foreign markets and suppliers
for industry, but also in order to avoid rising
fuel prices (jet fuel as well as gasoline),
and reducing otherwise choking road traffic
congestion, and polluting climate
change damaging carbon dioxide emissions
from vehicle and aeroplane exhausts.
Experiences in Europe, North America,
and Japan, and now more recently in
China, South Korea and Taiwan all point
to the strengths and advantages of railways.
Far from being a quaint legacy of the
past – the region’s first railways were built
in the mid to late 19 th century – modern
railways can hold their own, and indeed
outpace highways and jet planes as a mode
of passenger travel and freight transport.
Yet in Southeast Asia, government
transport development plans seem largely
premised on heavy reliance on new highway
construction and the assumption of
ever expanding car and truck growth.
How the region will be able to cope
with vehicle levels of the scale of say North
America is difficult to see. Some appreciation
of the scale of the impact ahead if vehicle
growth follows conventional patterns
can be gained by considering Vietnam.
Now one of the fastest growing economies
in Asia, despite its current problems
with inflation, car ownership in Vietnam
is still a low 12 per 1,000 or about 900,000
passenger cars. This is less than 10 pc of
the Thai level and about 1 percent of the
US level, according to research by local finance
company, VinaCapital.
●See page 17
Fast and reliable – MRT in Singapore
16 ICA Volume 2 Issue 7 2008