The resubmission of plans for a direct railway line between Taipei and Yilan has received a lot of media attention lately. The public has focused on the conflict between transportation infrastructure and environmental protection. This is not just a simple issue of building a direct railway line, but rather something that should be viewed in terms of the long-term development of services on the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) East Trunk Line.
Ever since the Taiwan High Speed Rail (THSR) service started in western Taiwan, structural transportation problems in eastern Taiwan have scarcely been given any serious thought and the topic has not been studied in any depth by academics.
Setting aside the issue of the combination of competition and cooperation between road and railway systems, the most common problem is people traveling to the east coast waiting at Taipei Railway Station for hours, or trying to get tickets via the telephone or online to no avail.
Although the new Puyuma Express Trains have entered service and the electrification of the Hualien-Taitung line is about to be completed, which will ease things to some extent, the main reason tickets are so hard to buy is that the line capacity between Taipei and Hualien became saturated a long time ago.
Since the trains currently running between Taipei and Yilan have an occupancy rate of more than 90 percent, there is not much room left. If instead we look at rail capacity, we see that demand for local trains with 2,600 available seats per peak hour is as high as 3,478 passengers. This means that very often, more than 30 percent of travelers cannot reserve a seat. This figure does not even include the potential demand represented by those who want to take the train but are unable to get tickets at all.
So in short, an imbalance in supply and demand for train tickets between Taipei and Yilan means that residents of the Hualien and Taitung areas face huge difficulties trying to get tickets to return home or go on holiday.
The real goal of building a new line from Taipei’s Nangang District (南港) to Toucheng Township (頭城) in Yilan County is to ease the bottlenecks between Taipei, Hualien and Taitung. This is not simply an issue of shortening train journeys by 18 minutes or 35 minutes. It must be viewed from a more long-term perspective.
Issues such as the development of tourism in Hualien and Taitung have long been neglected. How best to transport gravel from the east to the west of Taiwan and how to ease up the transportation bottlenecks on the North-link Line are all issues that also need to be addressed.
The plan is for a direct railway line connecting Taipei and Yilan to originate in Nangang. Nangang station is a major transfer center for TRA trains, the THSR and Taipei’s MRT. The new line will stretch from Nangang through Shuangsi (雙溪) in New Taipei City until it reaches a new station that will be built in Toucheng, from which Yilan County’s Gueishan Island (龜山島) will be visible along with great views of the Pacific Ocean.
Of course, with four lines running between Taipei and Yilan, not only will the bottlenecks between Taipei and Hualien be greatly reduced, it will also provide rushed travelers with the option of taking the new mountain line directly to Yilan, Hualien and Taitung, while those who want to take their time and relax can catch trains on the old sea line.
This means we will see the formation of a mountain line and a sea line between Taipei and Yilan, which, once completed, will be as frequently used as Greater Taichung’s mountain and sea lines.
I have paid close attention to the new direct railway line connecting Taipei and Yilan for more than a year and spoken to local residents in an effort to understand how much those living in Hualien and Taitung wish to reduce the developmental gap between Taiwan’s western and eastern areas.
This new railway line is a good way of doing that and it is the best way to implement the policy to focus on railway travel on the east coast and make road travel a supplementary mode of transportation.
Chou Yung-hui is director-general of Taiwan Railways Administration.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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