The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) is pressing the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp (THSRC) to revise its pricing plan, even as the company prepares to get its operation permit this week and begin trial operations soon after that.
The THSRC submitted its preliminary price plan to the ministry in the middle of October.
Under that plan, the cost of an economy-class car ticket from Banciao (
A Banciao-to-Taichung ticket would cost NT$700.
Ministry officials said yesterday that the price for each journey had hit the cap specified in the build-operate-transfer contract. They said there was no price differential between rush and non-rush hour tickets and no discount for round trips either. Passengers will also be charged a processing fee of 10 percent to 20 percent of the cost if they want a refund.
The officials said the prices could be lower.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of High Speed Rail said yesterday that in case of an accident, passengers would be compensated based on the Railway Law (
The amount seems low when compared with what airlines offer, which is usually at least NT$3 million in case of death.
The bureau has asked the company to recalculate its compensation offer.
To celebrate the official launch of the new system, the Chunghwa Post has begun issuing High Speed Rail stamps. Each set has two NT$12 stamps, one featuring the 700-T locomotive and the other featuring the Hsinchu train station.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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