An idle mind is a dirty mind
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is set to enforce an edict banning motor vehicles from idling for more than three minutes (“Legal limit on vehicles idling set to be enforced,” Aug. 10, page 2). After reading the story in the Taipei Times, I couldn’t help but notice the many absurdities surrounding this new mandate.
The agency openly admits that “Emissions from motor vehicles are the main source of air contaminants in urban areas ... and have a severe impact on air quality and public health.” Yet, at the same time, the agency is condoning three full minutes of engine idling (unless it’s 30°C during the hot summer, during which time vehicles may idle for as long as they want to allow for air-conditioning).
Idling any longer than 15 seconds is excessive and unnecessary. Sadly, the EPA’s new mandate could be -interpreted as saying that two minutes and forty-five seconds of idling is totally acceptable. To me, this is the same as saying that it’s permissible to litter, as long as you don’t dump a whole bucket of trash on the sidewalk.
Another problem I have with the three-minute rule, which I doubt the agency has the money or manpower to enforce, is that it is aimed at the wrong target. The problem in Taipei is not vehicles that idle for three minutes or more in front of places such as convenience stores, but rather the massive hordes of scooters that idle for more than 90 seconds, multiple times, during their daily commute.
There are intersections in Taipei where, at a two-minute red light, the cumulative idling time of the waiting scooters and motorcycles is more than 150 minutes (50 times the legal limit for a single vehicle). In my own round-trip commute, I spend on average 15 minutes (five times the legal limit for a single vehicle) at red lights.
It is time the EPA made a widespread public service announcement. Rather than impose a NT$1,500 to NT$60,000 fine for these minuscule violators, why not do more to tell commuters how it is actually in their best interests to stop idling? Wouldn’t it clean Taipei’s street-corner air much faster if people were educated about idling and how this is related to their health and wallets, instead of threatening them with fines?
Apparently, the agency seems unwilling to take this path, which is why Taipei has volunteer groups, including Idle-Free Taipei. This populist anti-pollution cause even has its own civilian superhero, Captain Air. With or without the help of the EPA or some “higher power,” these groups are committed to sending a message to motorists that idling is an unacceptable, dirty and extremely unhealthy habit that needs to stop immediately.
John Fleckenstein
Taipei
Tit-for-tat death
Regarding the recent controversies in Taiwan and abroad over the death penalty, let me propose something: If a person who is executed is eventually found innocent, then the prosecutors who successfully got that person executed should also be sentenced to death.
An execution is irreversible: If prosecutors think they are better than God in determining who should live or die, then they need to be held accountable for their decisions.
If such an accountability system is established, then naturally no more executions will ever occur.
Allen Timothy Chang
Hsinchu
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
As technological change sweeps across the world, the focus of education has undergone an inevitable shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) and digital learning. However, the HundrED Global Collection 2026 report has a message that Taiwanese society and education policymakers would do well to reflect on. In the age of AI, the scarcest resource in education is not advanced computing power, but people; and the most urgent global educational crisis is not technological backwardness, but teacher well-being and retention. Covering 52 countries, the report from HundrED, a Finnish nonprofit that reviews and compiles innovative solutions in education from around the world, highlights a
RSS