More than 100 members of Taipei City's "Tour Taxi Fleet" yesterday gathered to promote their English and Japanese language services, while urging the Taipei City Government to put greater effort into making the fleet's service more accessible to foreign visitors.
Established by the Taipei City Transportation Department last year, the service aims to increase Taipei's tourism competitiveness by providing English and Japanese-language services. The fleet includes 83 taxi drivers with English-speaking skills and 28 Japanese-speaking drivers.
To help passengers identify the taxis, the department last year provided stickers for display on the taxi windshields indicating the driver's ability. This year, the department also established a call center for the fleet.
Frank Wang (王憶台), a member of the fleet with English-speaking skills, however, shared his doubts about the effectiveness of the stickers and call centers, urging the city government to seek the cooperation of hotels and major tourist sites and allow the fleet to line up to pick up their target customers directly.
Fleet members Meike Liao (
"I pick up foreigners only two out of seven days in a week, and they don't know I speak English and Japanese until I tell them," Liao said.
Yeh Tzu-chuan (
Arranging exclusive opportunities for fleet members to line up in front of hotels and other tourist sites, however, may be difficult. Major hotels, MRT stations and tourist sites are often occupied and considered the "turf" of certain associations.
Those who need English or Japanese-speaking taxi services can identify the fleet's taxis by the stickers or call the 24-hour dispatch hotline at 0800-011-765.
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