Tag: Canal Istanbul

AFP

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Turkey plans to build a canal connecting the Black and Marmara seas as an alternative to the congested Bosphorus Strait, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Wednesday.

“We are rolling up our sleeves for Canal Istanbul, one of the greatest projects of the century that will outshine the Panama and Suez canals,” Erdogan told a party gathering.

The waterway, to cut through Istanbul’s European side, would be 40-50 kilometres (25-30 miles) long, with a width of about 150 metres (164 yards) and depth of 25 metres, he said.

The announcement of the plan – long kept secret as Erdogan’s “crazy project” – came as part of the prime minister’s pledges ahead of parliamentary elections on June 12, in which his Islamist-rooted party would seek a third straight term in power.

Preliminary studies and the drawing up of the project, expected to take two years, will start after the elections, Erdogan said.

He declined to disclose the exact location for the waterway and its estimated cost, but added that “financing will not be a problem.”

“One of the main objectives is to reduce traffic through the Bosphorus and minimise the (environmental) threat,” he said, stressing that about 140 million tonnes of oil were currently transported through the narrow waterway.

Erdogan, who served as mayor of Istanbul between 1994 and 1998, has other ambitious plans to transform the city.

In mid-April he announced plans to build two new towns on both sides of the city, while a tender to construct a third bridge over the Bosphorus will be held this summer.

A Turkish-Japanese consortium is currently building a rail tunnel under the Bosphorus to ease the congested traffic in Turkey’s greatest city.

“There is a kind of megalomaniacal desire to transform Istanbul into a large square of cruise tourism and a major financial center with all these large projects… This is a very-short term and ostentatious management style,” said researcher Jean-Francois Perouse, director of the Urban Observatory of Istanbul.

For Perouse, the real challenges that should be tackled for the survival of the city are environmental and social justice related issues.

The Bosphorus, which bisects Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city with some 13 million people, is the world’s fourth busiest waterway, and together with the Dardanelles Strait, connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

It is difficult to navigate because of its sinuous geography and treacherous currents.

Turkey has long warned that increase in maritime traffic, coupled with the growing size of oil tankers, make for a disaster waiting to happen, and has promoted oil pipelines through its territory.

In 1979 and in 1994, tanker crashes in the Bosphorus, whose shores are dotted with posh waterside villas, restaurants and historic sites, claimed 41 and 28 lives respectively.

Erdogan said the new channel would afford the daily passage of up to 160 vessels, including the largest ships, and would have bridges to allow car traffic.

Residential and business areas, complete with an airport that would be the third for Istanbul, would be built on the banks of the waterway, he said.

via Turkey to build canal to bypass Bosphorus: PM – News & Advice, Travel – The Independent.

By SEBNEM ARSU

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey unveiled a plan to build a new waterway to the Black Sea, promising that the tanker-clogged Bosporus through Istanbul would soon be used for sports and boat trips.

ISTANBUL — Heating up the campaign for the coming parliamentary elections, Turkey’s governing party on Wednesday unveiled a proposal to build a canal parallel to Istanbul’s Bosporus that would be longer than either the Panama or Suez canals.

Details of the plan, which has been speculated about privately in recent months as the “crazy project” of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had been kept under wraps, but on Wednesday it immediately became the centerpiece of his party’s bid for a third term in power.

The pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, foresees a 28- to 30-mile canal connecting the Black Sea in the north to the Marmara Sea in the southwest that would be a safer alternative for heavy tanker ships than the natural Bosporus straits, which run through the heart of Istanbul, a city of around 15 million people.

The plan aims to divert ship traffic along the Bosporus that sometimes numbers 149 tankers a day carrying natural gas, crude oil, chemicals and other industrial goods.

Mr. Erdogan suggested that the proposed canal, which would be about 500 feet wide and about 80 feet deep, would create jobs while protecting the natural waterway.

The leading opposition, the Republican People’s Party, or C.H.P., criticized the plan as unoriginal and as one that would benefit construction firms tied to the AKP.

The project “is just an effort to make their supporters rich,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the C.H.P. chairman, told the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency.

Polls, however, suggest that Mr. Erdogan’s party is on course to keep its majority in the June 12 elections.

Mr. Erdogan said that planning the canal would take around two years and that construction would be financed by domestic sources as well as foreign investors.

via Turkey Plans New Canal for Istanbul – NYTimes.com.