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Delays, traffic snarls greet homeward-bound travelers

An employee at Taipei's Sungshan domestic airport works the phones yesterday. PHOTO: AP

People returning home for the Mid Autumn Festival found yesterday to be a trying day as Taiwan's typhoon-damaged transportation networks buckled under the strain of holiday traffic.

While traffic conditions on and leading up to national holidays is always bad, the congestion was worsened this time by severe damage to highways and railroads caused by Typhoon Nari.

The Taipei Railway Station and Taipei's Sungshan Airport were both jam-packed yesterday with passengers waiting for a ride home. Cars also choked the nation's major freeways.

Though all rail routes were repaired and reopened yesterday, almost all scheduled trains were delayed for one to two hours. The trains were moving slower than usual, because the foundations of some stretches of railroad remain fragile and the electricity supply to others was unstable.

The Taipei Railway Station yesterday had scheduled 20 trains to run the Hualien-Taitung line, they were delayed at the tunnel between Taipei and Sungshan as a result of floodwaters, severely disrupting the schedule.

Rail traffic was further delayed yesterday because signal lights at the Sungshan station were found to have not been repaired. The station, which usually dispatches one train every four minutes, could only handle four trains per hour yesterday.

All domestic scheduled flights were fully booked, and wait-listed passengers had to line up for two to three hours before they could get a ticket.

Some flights to Kaohsiung and Makung were delayed yesterday because their respective airports were closed briefly because of inclement weather.

Road traffic was also slow yesterday, with average speeds on some freeway stretches barely exceeding 30kph to 40kph.

The Suao-Hualien coastal highway and four cross-island highways were still closed to traffic yesterday, and only single-lane traffic was allowed on the Taipei-Ilan highway.
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