New Phuket Bus Station To Open Mid-2010, At The Earliest

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New Phuket Bus Station to open mid-2010, at the earliest

The new Phuket Provincial Bus Station in Rassada. Work was completed three months ago. File photo.

PHUKET TOWN: -- The Phuket Land Transport Office appears resigned to run the new Phuket Provincial Bus Terminal by itself after two local governing bodies have lost interest in operating the facility.

Work on the new station was completed in early December, but efforts by the Transport Office to find a local government body to administer operations there appear to have failed.

Initially, both the Phuket Provincial Administration Organization (PPAO) and Rassada Municipality showed signs of interest.

Now Rassada Municipality, where the station is located, says it is ‘not ready’ to operate the station.

The PPAO, run by its fiscally conservative president Paiboon Upatising, is also no longer interested in running the station, according to well-informed sources.

With the station lying idle for three months already, the Phuket Land Transport Office now has little choice but to ask the Transport Ministry in Bangkok for additional funding to run the station on its own.

“Hopefully we will be able to open it by the middle of the year,” said Phuket Land Transport Director Kanok Siripanichkorn.

Another glitch in the Land Transport Office’s vision for the complex is that a plan to build a flyover to allow northbound buses to cross busy Thepkrasatree Road is on indefinite hold because Tambon Rassada has yet to approve construction, he said.

The office is now considering an alternate plan that would see buses cross Thepkrasattri Road into Sapam and use smaller roads before making their way north.

“We may have to expand that soi. We will talk about that later,” Dr Kanok said.

The main reason for moving the provincial bus terminal from its current location off Phang Nga Road in Phuket Town was to keep the large coaches off small city streets.

-- Phuket Gazette 2010-03-01

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[Valentine]

Whatever the reasons for the delay it just shows the authorities are not really interested in genuinely helping the public. I guess we can now expect to see hordes of buses having to do U turns on a busy main road disrupting already heavy traffic consideirng most of the buses in & out of Phuket are during peak traffic times.

Waiting on permission to build a flyover!! Lack of foresight & coordination between various departments is so widespread it must be normal to those involved but surely they must have thought about the traffic implications before they even started building the new terminal. Using some back street sois looks like a band aid measure & will certainly encounter many land issue problems which generally take years to resolve. Some examples which seemed to take forever are the acquiring of the small block of land for the start of the road which runs from nearby Promphan on Chao Fa West, road widening through Thalang, the road which runs up from Poonpol Plaza, Chao Fa West itself where the 4 lane road gets squeezed in many places & generally does not have a proper shoulder, & the classic tank farm debacle on Wichit Rd running to Rawai.

Phuket needs a lot more widening & building of secondary roads, urgently, if we are to prevent total gridlock from happening on a regular basis which does happen on occasion if there is an accident.