Jeddah’s long-awaited Tahlia underpass opens

Work on Jeddah's Tahlia-Sabaeen underpass has finally been completed and and it is now open to traffic. Mayor Hani Aburas will formally inaugurate it today.
Although part of the tunnel was opened last month to motorists and remaining parts were opened last week, some work remained to be done. After crossing the tunnel motorists find work in progress at the Tahlia-Macrona Road crossing. Nevertheless, the underpass is scheduled for inauguration today. Jeddah Municipality had announced that the Tahlia intersection with Prince Majed Road will be opened to public before Ramadan.
The project was supervised by Mayor Aburas with monitoring by Municipal Affairs Minister Prince Mansour bin Miteb.
The construction work began in 2008 and the underpass was scheduled to be completed by Sept. 29, 2011 but it faced obstacles, including delays in obtaining the authorization documents from the traffic department and more seriously due to the unforeseen issue of main water pipelines of Tahlia water plant passing through the area that was unaccounted for in the project plan earlier.
Consequently, authorities halted work on the project until changes could be made to the original design. The work resumed in 2009. However, further complications hampered and delayed the project, including the two layers of water isolation that needed to be constructed and a fire that broke out as a result of a fuel leakage. Due to these difficulties, the construction work once again came to a standstill in 2011.
According to the Jeddah Municipality, the underpass, which has cost SR. 137.8 million, is 700 meters in length with three lanes in each direction. It also has a pump to extract rainwater with a speed of more than 200 cubic meters per hour.
Jeddah Municipality is constructing 29 underpasses and overpasses to address traffic congestion in the city.