The Executive Yuan yesterday said that it is feasible to build a straight-line railway linking Taipei and Ilan with the build-operate-transfer (BOT) formula, contradicting a media report claiming that it is not.
"After talking with Minister of Transportation and Communications Lin Ling-san (
During his two-day inspection trip to his hometown of Ilan County, Yu announced on Tuesday that the Cabinet is studying the possibility of building a straight-line railway linking Taipei County's Hsintien and Ilan County's Chiaohsi with the BOT formula.
Yu also expressed the government's plan to connect the straight-line railway with the Hsintien line of the mass rapid transit system.
A Chinese-language newspaper, however, claimed that an evaluation report conducted by the transportation ministry showed that the plan is not likely to take off because not many private companies would be interested in the not-so-lucrative project.
According to Lin Chia-lung, the idea of building the straight-line railway with the BOT method is one of the pledges made by President Chen Shui-bian (
It is designed to upgrade the competitiveness of the railway system in the face of the completion of the planned north-south high-speed rail system and expressway linking Taipei and Ilan.
The government hopes to begin the NT$59.4 billion, 13-year project in 2006. Once completed, the travel time between Taipei and Ilan is expected to be reduced from the current 70 minutes to between 18 and 25 minutes.
Before any straight-line railway project idea came to be, the transportation ministry had once earmarked NT$16.7 billion this year to procure 334 special trains to reduce the travel time between Taipei and eastern Taiwan. The budget, however, was frozen by the legislature.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching