A Facebook user, Peter Lee, asked: “Shouldn’t the Hualien-Taitung transportation problem be a priority in the Forward-Looking Infrastructure Plan? If we keep talking about favoring the north over the south, when have we ever cared about how people in the east feel? Also, what right do we have to decide what infrastructure they build? Shouldn’t the local residents be the ones who matter most? We treat the east as our backyard garden—what right do we have to decide how the locals should live?”
This series of questions is actually a profound inquiry because the current consideration is about external transportation connectivity.
Since local life is, by definition, local, it’s impossible to make commuting to Taipei the center of one’s daily life. This kind of infrastructure certainly shouldn’t be evaluated from the perspective of trips someone makes only a few times a year, or whether it’s convenient for gravel trucks and freight vehicles.
Rather than holding such a perspective, it would be far more practical to demand that Taiwan Railways provide eastern residents with priority rights to purchase train and plane tickets several times a year.
Of course, I personally would not like to see a Suhua Expressway pop up someday. Not only would the construction scale be enormous, but various elevated highways would uglily tear apart the beautiful coastline. On top of that, with typhoons hitting head-on several times a year, the maintenance costs would surely be staggeringly high!!
Although the Suhua Highway Improvement is clearly a better solution, the DPP government seems to have amnesia!? Probably because Hualien-Taitung votes, like those of military personnel, civil servants, police, and firefighters, don’t tend to go to the DPP—I DO NOT CARE.