New multiple-card reading machines are set to make travel more convenient, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) said yesterday.
The service will be available on three different bus routes starting tomorrow, it added.
The ministry said the Banciao-Keelung (板橋─基隆) route operated by Taipei Bus, the Taichung High Speed Rail Station-Lugang (鹿港) route operated by Chan Hua Bus and the Kenting Express (墾丁快線), jointly operated by four bus services will all be equipped with multiple-card reading machines, which can read Taipei EasyCards (悠遊卡), Taiwan Smart Cards (台灣智慧卡), I Pass cards (高捷一卡通) and freeway electronic toll collection cards (ETC, e通卡).
Ministry of Transportation and Communications Deputy Minister Yeh Kuang-shih (葉匡時) said the ministry has budgeted NT$15 billion (US$515.3 million) on a three-year plan to promote the use of public buses. Integrating the different electronic cards used nationwide would be the key, he said.
The ministry plans to expand the service nationwide he said. By April next year, 34 bus operators in Taipei, Keelung, Taichung, Changhwa and Nantou Counties will have multiple-card reading machines installed in 6,795 buses operating on 795 bus routes. Chen Wei-ren (陳威仁), who was formerly MOTC deputy minister before assuming the post of Taipei deputy mayor last Saturday, spent two years working on the project. He said the original plan was to allow passengers to travel around the country with just one card.
“The one-card policy was too difficult to execute because it went against market mechanisms,” Chen said. “Different cards also have different formats.”
Chen added that the multiple-card reading machines allow the ministry to research passenger behavior. They can also accurately identify bus routes that need government subsidies.
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
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,