The Bureau of High Speed Rail announced yesterday that contractors have been found for all sections of the Airport Rail construction project, adding that the project was scheduled to be completed by 2014.
Yesterday afternoon, the bureau held a ground-breaking ceremony at the site of the Airport Rail’s Taoyuan Station, which was attended by Minister of Transportation and Communications Mao Chi-kuo (毛治國), Taoyuan County Commissioner Eric Chu (朱立倫) and other local dignitaries.
Mao said that the Airport Rail line would not only help facilitate faster transportation between Taipei and Kaohsiung, it would also become one of the main transportation systems connecting the Taoyuan Airport Zone and other cities in the vicinity.
He said the project had been delayed because of problems finding construction contractors.
The bureau said that soaring construction costs, delays in the environmental impact review of the Taipei-Sanchung section and unsettled disputes over the design of the Airport-Taoyuan section of the line had discouraged many contractors from bidding on the construction work.
The bureau originally estimated that the 51.5km Airport Rail would be fully operational by 2011.
All the construction work was finally given to contractors last month.
The construction costs are expected to reach NT$113.8 billion (US$3.45 billion), NT$20.2 billion higher than previous estimates.
The section between Sanchung (三重) of Taipei County and Chungli (中壢) in Taoyuan is scheduled to be in operation by June 2013.
The last section from Taipei to Sanchung will be ready by June 2014, the bureau said.
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