Motorists who fail to properly secure items, some of which may end up strewn around the nation’s freeways, could soon face much heftier fines, the National Freeway Bureau said yesterday.
Kang Jhy-fu (康志福), director of the Department of Traffic Management, said the bureau is amending the Act Governing the Punishment of Violation of Road Traffic Regulations (道路交通管理處罰條例). Drivers who do not properly cover or tie items tightly, which in turn allow the items to leak or scatter onto the national freeways, would face greater penalties.
The amendment would raise the penalty from between NT$3,000 and NT$6,000 to between NT$9,000 and NT$12,000, he said.
Kang said the proposal is under review at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, adding that it must also be approved by the legislature.
Statistics from the bureau showed that it dealt with 33,300 cases of items scattered on the freeways last year. That number has gradually increased compared with the totals in 2008 and 2009, which were 22,624 and 26,674 respectively.
Regarding the types of items, the statistics showed that 7,432 of them were bits of rubber from blown-out tires.
Approximately 3,200 were wooden items, while 2,300 were the remains of animals.
Meanwhile, bureau statistics recorded 15,254 instances of animal deaths on the freeways between 2009 and January this year. About 76 percent of them involved birds.
Cats and dogs accounted for 14.3 percent of the recorded roadkill.
“The dogs and cats could potentially be pets abandoned by their owners,” the bureau’s chief engineer Lien Shyi-ching (連錫卿) said.
The bureau also found dead squirrels, rats, bats, snakes, frogs, lizards, as well as pigs that might have been from trucks.
According to Lien, the scattered items caused 288 traffic accidents last year, injuring 40 people.
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