The Taipei City Government will start a trial bicycle-rental service in March, providing 500 bicycles for rent in the city’s Xinyi District (信義區), the Department of Transportation said yesterday.
The rental service will be expanded to all districts in the city if the test-run period proves successful, the department said.
A total of 500 bicycles built by Giant Manufacturing Co, the world’s largest bicycle manufacturer, will be available at 11 locations near the Taipei City Hall and Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall MRT stations, said Chen Rong-ming (陳榮明), a division chief at the department.
PHOTO: HOU CHENG-HSU, TAIPEI TIMES
Rental would be free for the first 30 minutes and NT$10 for each subsequent 15 minutes. A NT$1,500 fee will be charged for a lost bicycle.
People who fail to report the loss of a bicycle within seven days would be charged NT$3,000.
The department said that more rental locations would be set up near the Gongguan, Jiantan, Yuanshan and Danshui MRT stations.
The move follows similar efforts in Kaohsiung City, which inaugurated its own public bicycle rental network on Tuesday. Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said that about 50 bike rental sites would be established along the city’s MRT routes by the end of May, providing a total of 4,500 bicycles.
In related news, the MRT Muzha Line will close at 7pm during the Lunar New Year holiday, Taipei City’s Rapid Transit Systems said yesterday.
The service will be suspended after 7pm from Saturday until Feb. 1 to allow for testing of the integration with the Neihu Line.
The department halted weekend services on the Muzha Line for seven weeks between Dec. 6 and Sunday for testing. Commissioner of the department Tom Chang (常岐德) said testing had gone smoothly, but that the department would do more testing to make sure the integration of the two lines could begin operation as scheduled in June.
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
Starting on Jan. 1, YouBike riders must have insurance to use the service, and a six-month trial of NT$5 coupons under certain conditions would be implemented to balance bike shortages, a joint statement from transportation departments across Taipei, New Taipei City and Taoyuan announced yesterday. The rental bike system operator said that coupons would be offered to riders to rent bikes from full stations, for riders who take out an electric-assisted bike from a full station, and for riders who return a bike to an empty station. All riders with YouBike accounts are automatically eligible for the program, and each membership account
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
NUMBERS IMBALANCE: More than 4 million Taiwanese have visited China this year, while only about half a million Chinese have visited here Beijing has yet to respond to Taiwan’s requests for negotiation over matters related to the recovery of cross-strait tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. Taiwan’s tourism authority issued the statement after Chinese-language daily the China Times reported yesterday that the government’s policy of banning group tours to China does not stop Taiwanese from visiting the country. As of October, more than 4.2 million had traveled to China this year, exceeding last year. Beijing estimated the number of Taiwanese tourists in China could reach 4.5 million this year. By contrast, only 500,000 Chinese tourists are expected in Taiwan, the report said. The report
RSS