The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) yesterday gave a conditional pass to the environmental impact review for an electrification project for the railway line between Hualien and Taitung.
As the 155.5km railway line has yet to be electrified, express trains from Taipei to Taitung must change locomotives for diesel-powered trains in Hualien.
The environmental impact review committee required that the Railway Reconstruction Bureau ensure proper handling and relocation of earth removed as a result of the project. The committee also required the developer to ascertain the safe distance between tunnels and river beds.
The project was one of the alternatives proposed by the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) if the construction of the Suhua Freeway was halted.
Huang Joung-chieh (黃中杰), a project director at the Railway Reconstruction Bureau , said that the project did not face serious opposition from the committee.
However, Huang denied that the project had any connection to the construction of the Suhua Freeway.
"The project has been under review since 2004," he said. "The freeway and the railway are two separate matters."
Huang said the project would cost about NT$14 billion (US$424 million). Construction is expected to take seven years to complete.
Based on the bureau's study, the electrification project will boost the operating speed of the trains on the Hualien and Taitung line from 110kph to 130kph and reduce travel time to about one-and-a-half hours.
The Hualien-Taitung railway electrification project was also discussed at the legislature's Transportation Committee yesterday morning.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Justin Huang (
Huang said yesterday that the construction should start soon as the project had passed its environmental impact review.
Taipei on Thursday held urban resilience air raid drills, with residents in one of the exercises’ three “key verification zones” reporting little to no difference compared with previous years, despite government pledges of stricter enforcement. Formerly known as the Wanan exercise, the air raid drills, which concluded yesterday, are now part of the “Urban Resilience Exercise,” which also incorporates the Minan disaster prevention and rescue exercise. In Taipei, the designated key verification zones — where the government said more stringent measures would be enforced — were Songshan (松山), Zhongshan (中山) and Zhongzheng (中正) districts. Air raid sirens sounded at 1:30pm, signaling the
The number of people who reported a same-sex spouse on their income tax increased 1.5-fold from 2020 to 2023, while the overall proportion of taxpayers reporting a spouse decreased by 4.4 percent from 2014 to 2023, Ministry of Finance data showed yesterday. The number of people reporting a spouse on their income tax trended upward from 2014 to 2019, the Department of Statistics said. However, the number decreased in 2020 and 2021, likely due to a drop in marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic and the income of some households falling below the taxable threshold, it said. The number of spousal tax filings rebounded
A saleswoman, surnamed Chen (陳), earlier this month was handed an 18-month prison term for embezzling more than 2,000 pairs of shoes while working at a department store in Tainan. The Tainan District Court convicted Chen of embezzlement in a ruling on July 7, sentencing her to prison for illegally profiting NT$7.32 million (US$248,929) at the expense of her employer. Chen was also given the opportunity to reach a financial settlement, but she declined. Chen was responsible for the sales counter of Nike shoes at Tainan’s Shinkong Mitsukoshi Zhongshan branch, where she had been employed since October 2019. She had previously worked
Labor rights groups yesterday called on the Ministry of Labor to protect migrant workers in Taiwan’s fishing industry, days after CNN reported alleged far-ranging abuses in the sector, including deaths and forced work. The ministry must enforce domestic labor protection laws on Taiwan-owned deep-sea fishing vessels, the Coalition for Human Rights for Migrant Fishers told a news conference outside the ministry in Taipei after presenting a petition to officials. CNN on Sunday reported that Taiwanese seafood giant FCF Co, the owners of the US-based Bumble Bee Foods, committed human rights abuses against migrant fishers, citing Indonesian migrant fishers. The alleged abuses included denying
RSS