Though the price of gas has continued to rise since the beginning of this month, the Directorate General of Highways (DGH) said yesterday that national freeway bus fares were unlikely to follow the gas price hike for the moment.
DGH Director General James Chen (陳晉源) told reporters yesterday that the directorate had passed a resolution in February which stipulates that freeway bus service operators can automatically adjust bus fares when the weighted average of the diesel price announced by the CPC, Taiwan has exceeded NT$25.63 per liter.
Meanwhile, the directorate calculated the average price on the July 1, July 4, July 11 and yesterday and gained a weighted average diesel price of NT$25.827, only slightly above the legally-required adjustment threshold, he said.
Using the weighted average price of diesel, the directorate also calculated the increase in operational costs for bus operators and how gas price increases would translate to a fare increase per passenger per kilometer. The directorate found that should bus operators raise the fare, an increase would only be 2.27 percent.
"If they [the freeway bus operators] go ahead and increase the price, the increase will only be within NT$1 to NT$2, depending on the routes," Chen said.
The bus operators would hesitate to increase the price immediately since the law also says that the operators can only raise prices again four months after an initial increase, he added.
Chen said the new price plan must first be approved by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications and must be sent to nation's vehicle registration department for future reference.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods