The Maokong Cable Car system opened last Wednesday. What should have been a good thing has become a mess. The current and former mayor of Taipei were left hanging in mid-air on opening day. On the ground, long lines of people formed, traffic was a mess and street vendors jacked up their prices.
The mayor has reportedly decided that a set of management rules are needed -- and will be issued in October. City residents can appreciate the pressures on public officials, but having seen such chaos and inefficiency, I can only shake my head. Government institutions must make an effort to improve their project implementation and management skills.
Many construction projects in Taiwan focus only on the construction itself. The quality of construction is important. But as we see with the Maokong project, simply finishing a project doesn't ensure smooth operations.
It seems the focus on the cable car project was only on the hardware, while factors affecting the use of the facilities were ignored.
What impact would weather and high temperatures have? What would be the impact of traffic? Would traffic controls be needed? What about street vendors? Would they need to be controlled?
Questions such as these should have been dealt with beforehand. But such details are frequently overlooked, which results in expensive construction projects becoming the target of criticism, and this is a pity.
This is directly related to government agencies ignorance of management. Manageability is ignored at high social cost. In light of this, it is not strange that the inefficiency of government agencies is one of the main reasons that Taiwan frequently ranks so low in international competitiveness rankings.
The chaos surrounding the opening of the Maokong Cable Car system once again tells us that construction planning must include detailed and exhaustive management planning. If this is delayed until after the facility opens, chaos will be a given.
If Taiwan wants to overcome bottlenecks created by government inefficiency, we must strengthen management training and administrative ability within the civil service. If we don't, any talk about developing the tourism industry or improving competitiveness will remain ink on paper.
Ko Cheng-en is a professor in the College of Management at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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