Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) yesterday defended the city government’s traffic plan at the Taipei Bus Station for the Mid-Autumn Festival and said the measure, which sees passengers dropped off outside the station, could be adopted again during future holidays.
“We expect to have 389 buses per hour going in and out of the station during the festival, which exceeds the capacity of the station. Dropping off passengers outside the station should help ease traffic in the vicinity,” Hau said yesterday after inspecting traffic at the station.
The mayor said the capacity of the station, which can handle 279 buses per hour, could be insufficient during major holidays.
Taipei City’s Department of Transportation has set up an emergency response center to handle traffic problems over the next three days, he said.
To prevent large numbers of passengers and cars crowding the station and affecting traffic in the surrounding area, the Department of Transportation allocated four temporary locations outside the station for passenger drop-offs from midday yesterday until midday on Monday on Chengde Road and Civic Boulevard.
Hau said the new measure would cope with 160 buses per hour and should prevent traffic congestion in the area.
The area around the station, located at the intersection of Chengde Road and Huayin Street, began to experience congestion around Civil Boulevard and the Jianguo Overpass at about 4:30pm yesterday as passengers left Taipei for the holiday.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Chen Yu-mei (陳玉梅) accused the department of failing to make sure all the buses could enter the station and said she would continue demanding that the department improve the design of the station.
The station serves as the main transportation hub for 10 bus companies running 39 routes to Yilan County and Yilan City, as well as counties south of Hsinchu. Five other bus companies providing 10 routes to Taoyuan County and Taoyuan City and counties north of Taoyuan still use the old bus station on Chongqing N Road.
Luo Shiaw-shyan (羅孝賢), commissioner of the department, said traffic volume should be reduced when another bus station in Xinyi District (信義) is completed.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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