The Bureau of High Speed Rail under the Ministry of Transporta-tion and Communications confirmed yesterday that it had been informed of the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp's (THSRC) plans to increase the frequency of trains at the end of this month.
The THSRC hopes to increase train frequency from 19 per day to 25 per day in each direction. Of the six additional train runs, four of them would only run between Taipei and Taichung.
The THSRC also revealed plans to better serve customers in the south, in which some trains will not stop in Taoyuan and Hsinchu but will make stops at every station south of Hsinchu.
Pang Chia-hua (
Should everything proceed as expected, tickets for the additional trains will be available for purchase on March 26.
While presenting the company's plan, Pang criticized many aspects.
For example, the THSRC had chosen to outsource the management of advertising space to a contractor, which ruled out non-commercial advertisements.
In addition, Pang criticized the THSRC's ticket sale plans. The company is setting up 60 phone lines for customers to purchase tickets from an employee instead of from the automated system. This has limited the number of orders they can handle, he said.
Meanwhile, Vice Minister of Transportation and Communications Ho Nuan-hsuen (
The ministry decided to take back the right to operate after it rejected the original contractor's request to extend the expiration date of the contract.
"The operation of the Airport MRT Line is similar to a branch line in the TRA system," he said.
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