The government will launch a massive crackdown next month on large motorcycles that cause too much noise on the nation’s highways, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) announced over the weekend.
The EPA said local environmental protection bureaus had received complaints about the noise made by large motorcycles ever since the Ministry of Transportation and Communications allowed those riding motorcycles of 550CC or above to use expressways in 2007.
Several highway sections have even become favorite spots for bikers to gather or race, such as a section on Provincial Highway No. 3 in Miaoli County.
The latest statistics from the EPA showed that a total of 3,952 complaints about noise pollution were filed between September 2009 and February this year. About 80 percent of these cases were about the noise made by motorcycles ranging from 250CC to 550CC or other modified vehicles.
In addition, traffic noise was ranked the No. 1 category of noise pollution during the same period.
The EPA also found that those fined by the police generated noise measuring 90 decibels or more.
Hsieh Yein-rui (謝燕儒), director of the EPA’s Air Quality Protection and Noise Control Departments, said that the Motor Vehicle Noise Control Standards (機動車輛噪音管制標準) listed the noise levels for new motor vehicles during the certification period as well as for in-use vehicles.
The noise standards set for in-use motor vehicles are calculated by adding five decibels to the stationary noise measured at a certain engine speed during the certification phase, he said.
Those found to exceed the standards will be fined between NT$1,800 and NT$3,600, in accordance with Article 26 of the Noise Control Act (噪音防制法), he said.
Members of the public are encouraged to report information on vehicles generating excessive noise to the local environmental protection bureau, including the specifications and license plate numbers of the offending vehicles as well as the time and location of incidents.
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:
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