Elvan: We will give much more weight to highway projects

Elvan: We will put more emphasis on highway projects. Minister Elvan made a speech on the 2015 budget of the Ministry at the General Assembly of the Turkish Grand National Assembly.
Elvan said, “We will open around 2015 tunnels in 20. We will present many tunnels such as Karahan and Erkenek in Malatya, Çukurca in Hakkari, Cudi and Bitlis City Pass in Şırnak, Bitlis Stream tunnels, Sapça and Üzülmez tunnels in Zonguldak, Amasra and Çakraz tunnels in Bartın in the coming days. As of this year, more than 60 of our projects have been completed and await opening ”.
Expressing that they will continue the divided road works, Elvan continued as follows:
“One of the most important and important points for us is the north-south transitions, namely the axes connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and again the Black Sea to Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia. We are currently working on our 18 axes. As of today, an 80 percent realization has been achieved. In other words, we have completed 18 percent of the 80 axes from this Black Sea to the Mediterranean, Eastern Anatolia and Southeastern Anatolia. Again, we have 5 major major axes in the east-west axis. Of these, we have completed 86 percent of these east-west axes. : We will have completed the north-south axes and east-west axes as a whole in the next couple of years. One of the issues we care about is the Marmara Region, where the population density is very high. In a sense, we form a ring with the highway in the Marmara Region. We form a ring on the route from Sakarya to Kocaeli, from Kocaeli to Kurtköy, from Kurtköy to Yavuz Sultan Selim Bridge, from there to Tekirdağ Kınalı, from Tekirdağ Kınalı to Tekirdağ, Çanakkale and Balıkesir.
Our Istanbul-Izmir highway works are continuing and 60-65 percent of our highway works have been completed. I hope the Istanbul-Bursa highway will be opened by the end of 2015. On this route, we have the Gulf Crossing Bridge, which is the 4th largest bridge in the world in its field, and we will now have the opportunity to use this bridge. Especially our citizens going to Yalova will have the opportunity to cross the route, which takes one and a half to one hour and forty minutes, in a very short time such as 10-15 minutes. Another highway project we have recently put out to tender; There is the route from Akyazı to Kurtköy, followed by the Northern Marmara Highway Project. 95 kilometers. Right after the Northern Marmara Highway Project, we have also entered the highway tender for the route extending to Tekirdağ Kınalı. We will put out the tender for the remaining sections next year and we will cover the Marmara Region with a highway ring. We will put more emphasis on highways in the upcoming period. In the coming days, we are going to the Ankara-Niğde highway project tender. Another of our projects is the Ankara-Kırıkkale-Delice highway project. Another of our projects is the İzmir-Aliağa highway project. We will be bidding on these projects in 2015 and we will begin to focus more on our highways. "