'Make Suvarnabhumi City a business district'
Government Savings bank employees wait to welcome guests at the opening of its branch at Suvarnabhumi Airport yesterday.
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The Suvarnabhumi City to be built around the new international airport should be developed as a business area rather than a residential one, an academic suggested yesterday.
Speaking at a seminar titled "Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Thai Engineers' Eyes", Asst Prof Sompong Sirisoponsilp, director of Chulalongkorn University's Transport Institute, said the area around the airport should be a centre for trading or logistics.He said the area, which the government plans to develop as a new province, was not suitable for living due to noise pollution from the airport. The government claims that the new airport will have the capacity to handle 45 million passengers a year and help Thailand become a regional air transport hub. However, Sompong said, there would not be much benefit to the country if the majority of these passengers were only in transit to other destinations. Sompong proposed that the airport area be established as a central distribution centre to enable the country to become a logistics hub rather than just a transit, gateway or transhipment hub, he said. This would bring the Kingdom significant benefits from a variety of logistics-related services such as temporary storage and final assembly, he said. In addition, Sompong said this would attract foreign investors to invest and set up regional offices in Thailand, which would increase employment and encourage technology transfer. He said there were many factors to be considered in establishing a logistics centre, including location, transport costs, convenience of transporting goods, regulations and management, as well as government support. Dr Panitan Lukkunaprasit, a professor of civil engineering at Chulalongkorn University's Faculty of Engineering, criticised the new airport for being too large and lavish, which he said was because it had been designed before the financial crisis of 1997. Not only did this make the airport construction costly, but the use of large glass sections would lead to high energy expenses, he said. Also, the project was plagued by many corruption problems. Nevertheless, it would be good to develop the airport as a logistics hub, Panitan said. He added that the government should learn from past experience in building large constructions and focus more on sufficiency economy . Assoc Prof Anukalya Israsena, also from Chulalongkorn's Faculty of Engineering, said the new airport covered 20,000 rai and was six times larger than the airport at Don Muang. It also has the highest construction cost - Bt150 billion - and has taken almost 45 years to come to fruition. The new airport's terminal has eight storeys and a total area of 563,000 square metres. Sasithorn Ongdee, The Nation
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