Taipei will expand its “smooth road program” and begin road resurfacing work on roads and lanes less than 8m in width this year to ensure road construction quality, the Taipei City Government said yesterday.
The project is one of Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin’s (郝龍斌) policies and seeks to improve the poor condition of roads in Taipei.
The city government began work on 36 major roads in 2009 and will this year prioritize work on smaller roads, city officials said.
Taipei City’s New Construction Office director Huang Yi-ping (黃一平) said the city would allocate NT$229 million (US$7 million) for the program.
With work set to begin in many alleys, Hau apologized to local residents for the inconvenience and called on the public to help monitor the program by reporting any poor quality work or unauthorized road digging via the Taipei Citizen Hotline at 1999.
Contractors are supposed to scrape away the old road surface and replace it with at least 5cm of tar, and any road digging must be first approved by the city government.
Responding to complaints about the poor quality of work on some major roads, Hau blamed Taipower Co and Chunghwa Telecom for digging up roads without authorization from the city government and vowed to put a stop to such practices.
“We will keep an eye on the situation and consider barring companies [that conduct shoddy work] from digging up roads for a period of three months,” he said.
In a bi-weekly transportation meeting at Taipei City Hall on Friday, Hau instructed officials to establish a mechanism to review the quality of program work.
Information provided by the office showed that the city government approved 1,410 road-digging applications last month, with Taipower and Chunghwa Telecom responsible for 38 percent of the 32 unauthorized worksites discovered.
The inspection mechanism is also to serve as a major reference point in the selection of contractors, Huang said, adding that any contractor found to have done poor work or to be involved in graft would be blacklisted.
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