Thoughts about the Marmaray Project...

Lately I read an interesting article about a mega infrastructure project that had been carried out since 2004 and was opened with an impressive ceremony last week. It’s all about the “Marmaray Project”, an immersed rail tunnel connecting the European and the Asian side of Istanbul, Turkey’s capital city. The fact that humanity has the ability of building a tunnel with a length of 1.4 km which is immersed under more than 50 m of water is beyond  my imagination.

 

The Marmaray Project cost about $4.5 billion - which is an unimaginable giant amount of money. Knowing that I keep asking myself why... Why spending so much money on a project that is linked with many risks and dangers? For example if you look at the position of the tunnel in relation to a major fault line in the north of Turkey. Scientists are expecting an earthquake of high magnitude in the near future- a risk that mustn’t be ignored. Well of course this fact wasn’t ignored and the tunnel was designed to handle an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0, but that doesn’t really comfort me, I still remain sceptical.      

 

But coming back to answering the question: Istanbul is a rapid growing city with about 15 million inhabitants. That is why it faces some serious problems like scarcity of apartments and flats or traffic chaos which is linked with high carbon emissions. Statistics report that the Bosphorus is crossed by about two million inhabitants per day and that it takes about two hours to cross one of the two bridges (for those of us who thought that the Merangasse on a Friday afternoon is a catastrophe, we see that it could be even worse).

The new tunnel has a capacity of more than one million passengers per day so it actually IS a real improvement for the life of many people. Despite my doubts concerning the necessity of spending so much money on a still risky project I can understand why the Marmaray tunnel was built.

 

And like Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said in his opening speech: “Marmaray connects history and future, past and future, as well as connecting continents, Marmaray connects people, nations and countries." (Well, I wouldn’t have said it that dramatically but maybe there’s at least some truth in it!)