The legislature's Transportation Committee yesterday asked the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to evaluate the possibility of reducing freeway tolls from NT$40 to NT$30 in parts of central and southern Taiwan.
The committee also passed a resolution that the results of the evaluation should be delivered within a month.
The discount toll fees would apply to National Freeway No. 1 (Sun Yat-sen Freeway), south of the Yuanlin (員林) toll station in Changhua County as well as National Freeway No. 3 (Chiang Wei-shui Freeway), south of the Minchien (民間) toll station in Nantou County.
"On both freeways, the distance between two toll stations in the south is on average 10km shorter than in the north. This means that motorists in the south are being unfairly charged," Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Yeh Yi-ching (
From Yuanlin to Gangshan (
On Chiang Wei-shui Freeway, the average distance between toll stations is 35.3km from Minchien to Tianliao (
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Huang Chao-shun (黃昭順) concurred. Huang said the tolls had already brought in revenues equivalent to the sum spent on constructing the freeways and questioned why motorists were still being charged toll fees.
In response, Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau Director-General Lee Tai-ming (
Minister of Transportation and Communications Tsai Duei (蔡堆) said the distance between toll stations in the north was further because some sections of the freeways also function as local expressways.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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