The much-anticipated Marina Coastal Expressway (MCE) will open on 29 December four years after construction work started, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) revealed today.
The 5km-long MCE is Singapore’s tenth and most expensive expressway, built at a cost of S$4.3 billion or S$860 million per kilometre. It will connect the Kallang-Paya Lebar Expressway (KPE) and the East Coast Parkway (ECP) in the east to the Ayer Rajah Expressway (AYE) in the west.
A five-lane expressway in both directions, MCE will link motorists directly to the downtown at Marina South through new connections with Central Boulevard, Marina Boulevard and Maxwell Road.
With traffic currently using the ECP now channelled to the MCE, the stretch of the ECP west of Benjamin Sheares Bridge will be converted to a major arterial road. The stretch of the existing ECP after Central Boulevard will be expunged.
According to the LTA, this will free up more land in the city centre currently occupied by the ECP and allow for future development of the downtown at Marina South as a live-work-play precinct.
Notably, 3.6km of the MCE is built as a tunnel, including a 420m section underneath the seabed making it the first undersea road in the country.
Image: Map of the Marina Coastal Expressway. (Source: LTA video)
Romesh Navaratnarajah, Senior Editor at PropertyGuru, wrote this story. To contact him about this or other stories email romesh@propertyguru.com.sg
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