THE Land Transport Authority (LTA) has busted its budget for a new expressway by nearly 50 per cent - and work has not even started.
Yesterday, the LTA announced that it had awarded Samsung C&T Corp a $634.8 million contract to build about 800m of tunnels for the 5km Marina Coastal Expressway (MCE) - an underground and undersea road that will run through the new Marina Bay financial and entertainment district.
It is the fifth of six major civil contracts for the 10-lane highway, the construction of which will start in the first quarter of next year and is due for completion in 2013.
So far, $3.7 billion worth of contracts have been awarded - far exceeding the $2.5 billion estimated price tag when the project was announced last year. The remaining contract is expected to be awarded in the next few weeks.
The highway, which links the Kallang-Paya Lebar Expressway (KPE) to Ayer Rajah Expressway, could eventually cost $5 billion, or about $1 billion per km, making it Singapore's costliest road per km.
The underground KPE, currently the costliest, pales in comparison at $142 million per km.
"We have funding approval from the Government," the LTA said in response to a query from The Straits Times.
The authority attributed the escalated cost to poor soil conditions, land reclamation and the general increase in material cost.
The MCE is also wider, with five lanes in each direction, compared with three for the KPE.
The latest contract is Samsung C&T's second MCE deal. The firm had earlier clinched a $716.4 million deal to build a 950m stretch of tunnels.
The other civil works were awarded to Ssangyong Engineering & Construction, Penta-Ocean Construction and Sato Kogyo-Daelim Industrial.
This article was first published in The Straits Times on Nov 27, 2008.
