Taipei City has decided that the Maokong Gondola, closed since Oct. 1, 2008, is safe to reopen sometime soon, now that the eroded T16-1 support pillar has been relocated. Months of investigation by experts resulted in numerous suggestions, although only three “deficiencies” were publicly mentioned last week.
Maokong Gondola inspection committee chief Lin Jyh-dong (林志棟) said clearer instructions were needed on where passengers could pick up boarding numbers and how to line up; trash around stations needed to be picked up and the system’s standard operating procedures for emergencies needed a review.
It’s hard to believe that better queue management and less trash is really all that is needed before the gondola can begin running again.
Taipei residents were already concerned about the system’s 25 pillars, so recent news that the system’s Taipei Zoo Station had been built over an abandoned coal mine simply reinforced the impression that political considerations outweighed geological and ecological ones in the rush to construct the system.
The head of the Chinese Union of Professional Civil Engineer Associations, James Yu (余烈) tried to be reassuring last week, but his words fell flat. An inspection by association members concluded the gondola was “absolutely safe,” he said, unless there was a typhoon or torrential rain, before adding that no design could be 100 percent perfect. His analogy between the gondola system and a premature baby who requires intensive medical care to survive didn’t help.
Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) promised the system would not reopen until it was clearly “safe.” While Hau gave no timetable — except to say “the spring” — his Department of Transportation chief Luo Shiaw-shyan (羅孝賢) said it was likely to reopen before Hau left on a trip at the end of this month.
Perhaps the “we care about safety” message is not really meant for Taipei residents — but for the hordes of tourists, Chinese or otherwise, that the city government is trying to entice here, especially the thousands expected to descend, come November, for the five-month long International Flora Expo.
However, even the most optimistic might believe that the gondola system needs a complete rethink, given the wave of breakdowns in its first few months that made riding the glitch-prone Wenshan-Neihu MRT line look like a walk in the park. Perhaps we’re meant to feel grateful that the city was willing to shut down the gondola at all, as it has proven unwilling to do the same for the Wen-Hu line.
These transportation nightmares are enough to make one feel a bit sorry for Hau, who inherited them from his predecessor, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). It’s too bad Hau didn’t see the writing on the wall when he and Ma got stuck in a gondola cabin on the system’s opening day because of a faulty door.
Hau has done all he can to shield Ma from blame, because that’s what loyal Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members do. However, is it too much for Taipei City residents to ask that he pay a bit more attention to their needs and a little less to those of the KMT? Asking the Control Yuan and Taipei Prosecutors’ Office to investigate 11 city officials and two companies for possible dereliction of duty over the gondola, as Hau did in January, is not enough.
The city government used political chicanery to rush through construction of the gondola, claiming it didn’t need a construction licence because the system was a major transportation facility and that no environmental impact assessment was needed because the area covered by the system was not large enough to warrant such a measure. Taipei residents and visitors alike shouldn’t have to sacrifice their safety on the altar of political expediency.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS