470km of overhead cables to be removed

SHANGHAI will remove 470 kilometers of overhead cables by 2020, the urban planning development body said yesterday.

Huang Yongping, director of Shanghai Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission, said the hanging cables blemished the image of the city.

“The coiled overhead cables look like a collection of scrapped bike tires hanging in the sky,” Huang said.

The city has begun work on removing over 20 kilometers of overhead wires around the city. Jing’an and Hongkou districts have completed the first phase of removing the cables, while work along Wuning Road in Putuo District began yesterday.

Shanghai has tried more than once to remove the cables since the 1990s, but due to complicated ownership and limited underground space, it never panned out as planned.

“Regardless of that, for the sake of the city’s image and for safety reasons, getting rid of these cables is imperative,” Huang said.

Meanwhile, an “intelligent” alarm for emergency situations will be set up in the new integrated street lamp posts for prompt action. The city plans to integrate the system on all future infrastructures.

Intelligent sensors will be planted in the lamp posts to detect dangers.

“Intelligent technology is an absolute must for future urban management,” Huang said. “We are probing into the possibility of building an automatic sensing system so that we are notified about accidents and potential risks immediately.”

The first batch of new street lamp posts have come up on Nanjing Road E. Huang said designers looked at other metropolis like Tokyo and London before deciding on the shape of the new lamp posts.