| Content | The Directorate General of Highways is using a special project method to drive the Provincial Highway 9 Huatung Highway Safe Landscape Boulevard Project. The schedule for this project is from 2017 to 2024. The total funding is approximately TWD 9.47 billion and the road improvement section is approximately 41.2 km.
The east coast area possesses a beautiful natural landscape and tourism has always been Hualien County’s main economic development source. Provincial Highway 9 Huadong Highway is the main traffic artery of the east coast area and an important road for tourism development. In the past few years, multiple major traffic accidents have occurred on this road. Thus, the improvement objective of the Provincial Highway 9 Huatung Highway Safe Landscape Boulevard Project is foremost to reduce the probability of traffic accidents, and to take into account tourism development factors when implementing Provincial Highway 9 widening work.
In past road planning, design, and construction, landscaping has generally been positioned as beautification work after the traffic and civil engineering portion of the projects. However, this method de-emphasized the humanities, ecology, visual sequence, weight, and aesthetics of the facilities, environmental protection, and climate response of the overall corridor.
Different from previous improvement thinking with regard to highway widening, this project is based on the theme of human-centric safe landscape boulevard. Road landscape, traffic safety, and environmental protection were explored to determine the best integrated solution. The development characteristics and local characteristics of each road section is considered to create a safe landscape boulevard for the east coast area. This can also serve as a pioneering example for domestic road improvements.
It is expected that after this project is complete, the service quality of the bottleneck road sections will improve. The central divide and traffic lane allocation in the road improvement section will reduce accident probabilities while making dangerous road sections with poor visual fields safer. This improvement project will also integrate local development characteristics and surrounding landscape to turn Provincial Highway 9’s landscape into a landscape boulevard with Hualien characteristics. |