“the big dig will start in about 2 years time, the city centre will be dug up with the new metro and luas lines”

said by frank fahey (member of the irish parliament and head of the transport committee) on today fm (i heard it through the rail users ireland podcast). the phrase “the big dig” scared me, the history of tunnelling in dublin scares me as well as the thought that frank probably thinks that doing anything is better than doing nothing or putting thought into what is done before doing it.

a long planned tunnel underneath helsinki city centre looks unlikely now to be built because of a change of heart of one of the main parties in the helsinki city council. i wonder if audible gasps were heard from members of the other parties when the decision was announced yesterday.

the tunnel was due to cost about 500million euros and would have stretched from ruoholahti to the west of the city and go to just north of sörnäinen.

helsinki city planning department: central tunnel website (in finnish)
helsingin sanomat: proposed helsinki tunnel unlikely to be built (in english)
also an anti-tunnel site by activists: keskustatunneli.fi

at the same time there is some doubt about the metro extention westwards to espoo - rising costs (going from 430million euros to 800million euros). hopefully now that the central tunnel has been (most likely) cancelled resources can be put into the metro extension. (yle.fi story).

there was a story in helsingin sanomat a while back about the high rates of lone drivers in cars coming from espoo to helsinki.

an astounding video for a proposal for a new mosque in the islands brygge region of copenhagen by the bjarke ingels group (big) architects office can be seen here on this page.

new tram line construction going on here in helsinki - on this page there are some pdfs of the proposals for simonkatu, mikonkatu and kaivokatu.

this is hypnotising: helsinki live transport map. (currently for a few bus routes). click on the bus icons for more options - like time to next few stops, plus “follow bus” option. mmmm.