Shin Osaka isn’t far out. I used to live one station next to it for a few years.
3 stops on the subway from Umeda. Takes like 5 mins
I’m depressed reading about it.
Yilan was known for being beautiful and quiet and as people already said the tunnel has already ruined that sleepy town feel. All they need is this hsr so the rich property speculators can get richer and make it into Soulless Taipei 2 electric boogaloo
Not the project as a whole, in the sense of we need public transport. More the corruption aroundcertain parts of and poor planning. Mrt station fiascos in taipei, kaohsiung mrt misseries (the collapse bing the easiest one to criticize), tunnel expenditures, constant repairing.of hopeless mountain roads, some of which are literally just protectig meth labs. I mean aboriginal citizens who have a right. Busses are a wreck, taidong train station relocation.
Seems a big favorite of the gov is to do projects where their boys own real estate regardless of long term logic.
Take one look at traffic in places like taipei, taichung and tainan and one realises they werent really looking too far past their land sell off dates.
The amount of money taiwan spends on roads must be astonishingly incomprehensible. One would think for that much money we would have a futurama tube setup by now.
Youve seen their web site programming right? and no wifi in cars please.
I once read that over 50% of the cost of infrastructure projects in the UK was spent on legal fees - probably true in the west in general. Whereas here there seems to be a lot less legal hassle, so they can spend money on actually building things.
I wouldnt be surprised if that was true, for sure. The issues here are building things are too often make work projects. The main road through my village, 7.8km long was repaved 3 years ago. 6 months after completion they dug up part of one side to redo some ditches, about 4km. They repaved half after. 2 years ago they put in new water pipes into the houses from the main line, half the road. Repaved after. Then they did the other half of the ditches. Pre election the repaved the entire road, new gaurd rails, lights etc. The works. Looked good. 3 months ago they are replacing said water pipes above and redoing the ditch. I measured the old one and bew kne, new one is a few cm wider. I drink with the guys handing out prohects so know for aure its intentional. And everywhere i have lived in taiwan long term has been more or less the same. Our tiny pocket of nothing, couple hundred people max, has spent millions usd just on this stupid road because they cant coordinate jobs from first to last. Imagine if that money went into meaningful education, clean food, digging some form of water security or just paying off debt. Drives me person mad. But they buy the beer, so there we go 
This village and the neighbouring.one have dozens of “parks” and fixed up shacks as heritage which have cost tens of millions these years here. The new wetland they did, which is huge and quite pretty, they mucked up everything they planted. One wind storm all the trees fell over few hundred. As i watched them plant thwm it was obvious. I went into the new million dollar township mansion (literally) and talked with the project director and said i can volunteer to plant them for free and do it right. Pay the machine costs and we are good. No way. Make work, pay your friends. Its disgusting. No wonder so many people dont take pride in their community like the japanese do. Be corrupt, but at least waste money on quality and find new things to steal from. Taiwan would be the envy ofthe world extremely fast.
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I read somewhere America has the most lawyers per capita in the world. I wouldn’t be surprised that over 50% of the cost of anything is legal fees. This is one reason why healthcare is so expensive there too, legal fees. Legal cost is definitely one of the biggest reason why jobs are moved overseas.
Whereas say Japan it’s much harder to sue people and lawyers work differently.
Back to the topic at hand… what are we looking at?
Actually up and running by 2030?
So I can cross off Yilan as a possible retirement location.
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Should never have been. 
Look more toward Hualien (central/southern), Taitung, Pingtung, Kaohsiung, or Tainan, in no particular order.
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Yilan was low on the list. We did notice some affordable houses being built in Su’ao. I love Hualien but it’s far from everything. I need a Costco within an hour’s drive.
Can I ask if you know if home prices are decent in Yilan city or have they already become unaffordable and/or inflated? Thanks
Define affordable.
One person may think NT$500,000 per ping is doable, while another would rather only see NT$100,000 per ping.
What’s your standard per ping you want to see?
Yes , the original plan is to finish this project in 10 years
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Have you seen a good map of what’s going to take place between Taipei and Keelung? One of the articles you linked to above had a good map, but then it disappeared in the article. Strange.
This is from the first article in this thread.
I guess it’s good enough but I got the impression that this is still a work in progress and could change. It looks like the new line will be adjacent to the train tracks and end at Nangang Exhibition Hall (whereas the train passes through Nangang Station but not the Exhibition Hall station). That will be nice to have a quick option to get to the Nangang Exhibition Hall, instead of driving or the bus.
And then who knows what’s going on in Keelung. It seems Baifu is the end of the fast track?
Thank you. And I like how the Xizhi-Minzu line starts at the Xizhi Government Office (Xizhi City Hall I think is what they call it in English). I have suspected for years that all the apartment building in the area was being done because people with money new something was happening (because there was nothing really there to be building around).
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My mother in law and father in law were both born in Yilan County and have spent basically their whole lives here. My father in law tells me stories about growing up in Sanxing and the only option to get to Luodong being by foot or by bicycle, which took a few hours. Luodong was the faraway big city: Taipei was another world. Their families on both sides have been here in Yilan since Chinese people first displaced the aboriginals, which was “only” something like 200 years ago.
If you ask them, there’s very little if any nostalgia for the old days. Yilan has gone through many phases over the last 200 years, from a ruthless, violent aboriginal hunter-gatherer society to an equally ruthless and violent showdown between invading Chinese and aboriginals, to incursions by ships from America and Japan and elsewhere, to the ultimate Japanese takeover, to the KMT days of political lockdown and fast development, to today’s democratic period. At every step of the way, the trend has been toward a gradual, step-by-step increase in transport and economic links to Taipei and onwards to the outside world. First better footpaths. Then a basic coast road. Then a coast railway. Then a highway over the mountains. Then a highway through the mountains. Next, an HSR.
How far back should we pine for? For the aboriginal days? For the KMT days? For a perceived “just right” window after the car tunnel but before the HSR?
My point is that progress is not only inevitable, it’s not a recent phenomenon. It’s always been going on, it’s always defined everything, and it will continue to do so, whether we like it or not.
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It totally depends what you want, Yilan has crazy housing variety. If you are looking for a small apartment or unit in an older building out in the countryside, that can still be had for very, very cheap.
On the other end of the spectrum, if you want one of the big, nice new freestanding single family homes on its own piece of land in a good location, probably $1m USD.
And there’s everything in between.
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