The Taipei City Government yesterday denied the problem-plagued Wenshan-Neihu (Wenhu) MRT Line caused a deficit for Taipei Rapid Transit Corporation (TRTC) while defending a delay in adding 25 older trains to the line.
The Chinese-language Next Magazine in its latest issue yesterday said the TRTC, which has been making profits for the past 14 years, suffered an operating loss of about NT$30 million (US$930,000) after the Neihu Line began operation last year.
Top officers at the company, including TRTC chairman Lin Chong-yi (林崇一) and TRTC general manager Tsai Huei-sheng (蔡輝昇), still received annual bonuses of NT$300,000 to NT$700,000 despite the deficit, the magazine said.
Tan Gaw-guang (譚國光), deputy secretariat of the Taipei City Government, yesterday rebutted the report, saying the Neihu Line caused a loss of NT$30 million, but the TRTC still made a profit of NT$304 million last year.
The annual bonuses were given in accordance with regulations, he said.
“The magazine used wrong information to mislead readers and ignored the long-term efforts of the TRTC staff. It is not fair,” he said.
He acknowledged the TRTC failed to make the 25 older trains from the Muzha MRT Line compatible with the Neihu Line’s Bombardier system.
The compatibility test for the trains to be running on the Neihu Line was originally scheduled to be completed by February, but will be delayed until December.
Taipei City Government spokesperson Chao Hsin-ping (趙心屏) denied the schedule was delayed to prevent the compatibility issue from affecting Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in November’s Taipei mayoral election.
“We decided to postpone adding the 25 trains to the Neihu Line purely for safety reasons,” she said.
The TRTC is now conducting a test-run of the trains, and will introduce to service in December,” she said.
The Wenshan-Neihu Line, an extension of the Muzha Line, did not continue with the French-built Matra system used on the original Muzha Line, and instead had a system built by Montreal-based Bombardier.
A total of 51 new trains are running on the Wenshan-Neihu Line, and Bombardier has refitted the 25 original Muzha Line trains to make them compatible with its system.
The company wants to increase the number of trains in operation on the Neihu Line by adding the old trains into service.
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