Activists on Monday presented a petition urging the Taipei City Government to abandon its Taipei Dome build-operate-transfer (BOT) project and instead build a public park on the site.
The long-stalled dome project by the Farglory Group obtained construction approval from the city’s Urban Design Review Committee in June, with construction of the 40,000-seat indoor stadium complex and commercial facilities at the abandoned Songshan Tobacco Factory scheduled to commence next month.
The petition, which was signed by nearly 100 specialists and academics, was presented at a press conference at the Taipei City Council. The initiators of the petition — the Organization of Urban Re-s (OURs), the Songshan Tobacco Factory Park Union, the Taiwan Environment Information Center, the Society of Wilderness and the Wild at Heart Legal Defense Association — questioned the rationale for building the dome.
They said it would have a negative impact on the environment, including the destruction of a historic site and old trees, and would cause noise and air pollution as well as traffic problems.
Tamkang University transportation management associate professor Chang Sheng-hsiung (張勝雄) said a stadium that could accommodate more than 10,000 people needed more space to meet transportation needs.
While the planned dome is next to an MRT station, “according to the developer’s reports, the platform at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall’s MRT Station can accommodate 4,728 people. Doing some calculations [assuming a train arrives every 4 minutes] shows it will take up to an hour for 20,000 people to leave the dome,” Chang said.
Moreover, if hundreds of buses and thousands of cars or motorcycles come at once to pick up the crowd, it will certainly cause severe traffic jams, he said.
On the issue of economic efficiency, Huang Rei-mao (黃瑞茂), a professor of architecture at Tamkang University, said the dome would mainly be used for music performances, but there is already the Taipei Pop Music Center project in Nangang District (南港) with 6,000 seats, Taipei Arena with 15,000 seats and the Taipei World Trade Center Nangang Exhibition Hall with 18,000 seats, all near the site of the dome.
He said the dome could become the largest vacant building in the country because of its enormous scale and corresponding high rent, making it hard to reclaim its management cost.
The groups also called for an expansion of public green spaces, adding that the dome project would destroy the last “green lungs” of the eastern side of Taipei.
A report by the city’s Public Works Department in 2009 showed that the average green space per person in Taiwan was 5.16m2, which OURs said was lower than Seoul’s 15.93m2, Beijing’s 12.6m2 and Singapore’s 7.99m2.
OURs added in a press release that the average nighttime temperature in metropolitan Taipei was about 3°C higher than the global average, and that the number of days in downtown Taipei where temperatures rose above 35°C was also increasing.
The group called for the creation of a green space at the dome site to prevent an increase in the urban heat island effect, modulate sudden rainfall and maintain biodiversity.
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