Tunnel road proposal for Phuket. Is is a good idea though?

One of the things you will notice if you ever visit Phuket is the horrible traffic and how there just isn't really any more land available for them to do anything about that. The land is gone, there is nowhere else to build unless they were to put it over the sea.

There has been talks about building light rail or another highway from one end to the other of the island but this would entail forcibly taking land away from legal landowners, many of whom are rich and powerful and mostly when eminent domain gets used around the world it is to take things away from poor people. Ok, that might not necessarily be true but the light rail idea was abandoned rather quickly because of the fact that Phuket is not a public transport island and anyone taking the rail from anywhere to anywhere else would be subjected to extortionate taxi fares or perhaps just unavailability to go anywhere at all once they arrived unless going on foot - which no one wants to do in the super heat that is Phuket.

The government has another idea to ease one of the worst traffic areas on the island and it is going to cost around half a billion USD to do it.

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This is just a conceptual drawing and I found it funny that the decided to put very light traffic on it considering that almost all roads in Phuket are jam packed with cars all day every day.

This project would send cars through the mountain that separates the rest of Phuket from the most popular beach Patong. Currently the only way to get to this beach is to over a horribly dangerous twisting road that goes over the mountain range.

This is just the way it is here and the best thing to do is just keep your cool, stay in your lane, don't try to pass, and accept the fact that it is going to take a while. This takes about half an hour to go just a few km and the government proposal is to build a tunnel that will cut that time to less than 5 minutes .

That's a poor representation of the tunnel entrance. If the mountain was that flat they would just continue to go over it. It juts out pretty rapidly and the way that the road is now must have taken a long time to establish.

So this all sounds fine and great and all but I take issue with it because it seems as though this is only going to encourage more development on this island when at least in mine and almost everyone else's opinion that live there, the island achieved critical mass as far as the population is concerned quite some time ago.

I don't know if attempting to accommodate MORE people is the way to go and here's why. While this tunnel would help to alleviate the congestion at this one spot it wouldn't do anything about all the other roads that exist on the island. Adding the illusion of easy transport in this single spot of land for half a billion dollars is going to create more problems at more places in Phuket. No matter how much money we throw at this, it isn't going to change the fact that there simply isn't anywhere left to build.

I avoid Phuket because of the traffic and how everything that you might want to do there seems like a huge hassle because it is going to take you ages to get from one point to another.

It isn't definitely going to be done though. I think that Thailand should really start to focus on what is really affecting tourism levels and it isn't traffic jams. The real problem is the government themselves and how they keep mismanaging Immigration policies. Of course nobody wants to talk about that because to do so would be to admit fault on the government's side of things. You will never see any politician in Thailand ever admit that they were wrong about something.