The Taipei City Government will complete road-smoothing works on 12 major roads by the end of this year, and improve the quality of all municipal roads by 2014, Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) promised yesterday.
The city government presented its “Smooth Road Project” (路平專案) in May to solve the long-term problem of poor road conditions in the city, and began construction on 12 roads including Zhonghua Road, Linsen Road, Nangang Road, Dunhua N Road, Changan W Road, Wanda Road, Changan E Road, Shipai Road, Dunhua S Road, Xinhai Road, Minquan E Road and Chengde Road.
TOUGH MEASURES
PHOTO: LIU HSIN-DE, TAIPEI TIMES
Hau yesterday inspected the project on Zhonghua Road, and vowed to toughen measures to demand the best quality for the repairs.
“We will make the municipal roads something we can be proud of in Taipei City,” Hau said.
Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City Councilor Liu Yao-ren (劉耀仁), however, challenged the city government’s efforts, and said according to IRI values, a standard roughness scale used to estimate road pavement unevenness, the pavement construction on Zhonghua Road, which cost nearly NT$10 million (US$300,000), failed to make the road smooth.
COMPLAINTS
A local resident, surnamed Lee, also complained about the poor quality of the roads, and said scooter drivers have been tolerating the bumpy roads around the city for a long time.
Liu demanded that the city government make contractors redo any construction that fails to meet the city’s quality standards.
PROMISES
Hau promised to demand the highest quality from the contractors, while calling on local residents to cooperate with construction crews since the work sometimes causes traffic congestion and other problems.
He further vowed to ban all illegal road-digging work, and encouraged all residents to report any illegal activities to the city government.
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:
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