Lauding the partnership between the Kaohsiung City Government and the Kaohsiung Rapid Transit Corp (KRTC), Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) said yesterday the city government would help the company resolve its financial problems and ensure its survival.
Chen also said the city would achieve the goal while safeguarding the interests of its residents.
Kaohsiung’s MRT system began operation in March last year, making it the first MRT system in southern Taiwan. Construction of the system — a build-operate-transfer (BOT) project — took 10 years.
Director-General of the city’s Bureau of Mass Rapid Transit Chen Kai-ling (陳凱凌) told the city council that the KRTC’s book loss is expected to hit NT$6.08 billion (US$188.3 million) by the end of this year. Chen said about 120,000 people take the MRT everyday, bringing in a daily income of NT$2.92 million.
The company still incurs monthly losses of about NT$250 million, Chen Kai-ling said.
Chen Kai-ling said he would require shareholders of the company to help increase the company’s capital.
KRTC president Liu San-chi (劉三錡), who was present during the briefing, urged the city government to help the company with the financial deficit, saying that the city government would have to take over the MRT system at the expense of NT$25 billion if the KRTC could not continue operation, as stated in the contract between the company and the city.
Liu said the city should propose a policy to more effectively raise the number of passengers traveling on the system.
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
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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