Festival fun and holiday blues

Yeh Chu-lan (葉菊蘭), minister of transportation and communications, yesterday asked for travelers' tolerance and understanding in the face of transportation chaos during the Mid-Autumn Festival, blaming recent typhoons for the mayhem.

Yeh inspected transport conditions in the country early yesterday, the last day of the holiday, using computer monitoring systems at Taipei Railway Station, Sungshan Airport and the highway bureau in Taipei County.

It was expected that northbound traffic would face severe congestion yesterday, as people returned home in readiness for work and school today.

"Travelers on the highways, railways and airways suffered significant inconvenience. But I believe that they all understand that typhoons Toraji, Nari and Lekima are responsible," Yeh said.

Road and rail networks took a battering from each of the three typhoons, which brought torrential rains, the first in late July, the other two late last month.

Saying that the agencies concerned would examine their past performance during holidays in order to make future improvements, Yeh emphasized that the ministry had planned ahead to divert traffic during the holidays.

At the beginning of the holiday on Saturday, several domestic airports experienced temporary closures because of the downpours brought by Typhoon Lekima. Damage to railways at many locations had not been fully repaired by Friday, despite a promise from the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA, 台鐵) on Thursday that rail services would be back to normal the following day. Some journeys were impossible and severe delays were the rule. With air and rail transport thus crippled, the road network was jammed.

Yeh said yesterday that all staff of the transportation agencies had done their best, some even sacrificing sleep to help fix problems.

Huang Te-chi (黃德治), the TRA's chief, almost sobbing as he publicly briefed the minister, said that accumulated damage caused by the three typhoons was responsible for the delays.

But some TRA staff felt that pressure from the ministry had caused the TRA's management to underestimate the time required to repair the damage. On Friday and Saturday, most trains suffered delays, some up to five hours, because of repair work.

"The ministry and the railway's top administration set a deadline for the repairs and announced it to the public. But our engineers knew that the goal was impossible to achieve," said Cheng Yu-sheng (鄭玉盛), a TRA director of station affairs in Taipei.

"Forcing all the trains to operate while conditions on the roads were still poor after initial repairs was responsible for the rail congestion," he added.

Rail services were less impaired yesterday than on Saturday. But trains were still arriving 20 minutes late on average.

Northbound freeways were packed after 3:00pm yesterday. On some sections, cars could not exceed 30kph.