The section of Provincial Highway No. 65 connecting Sianmin Boulevard (縣民大道) in New Taipei City’s (新北市) Banciao District (板橋) and the Tucheng Interchange on Freeway No. 3 is scheduled to be operational next month, the Directorate-General of Highways (DGH) said.
Also known the No. 2 Expressway in New Taipei City (新北市特二號道路), the highway was designed to connect the Wugu Interchange on Sun Yat-Sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1) and the Tucheng Interchange on the Formosa Freeway (Freeway No. 3).
The entire highway, which is about 12.8km long, is built on an overpass and is scheduled to be completed by December next year. The highway’s construction costs have topped NT$30.9 billion (US$106 million).
The DGH opened the section between the Wugu Interchange and Jhongjheng Rd (中正路) in Sinjhuang District (新莊) to traffic last year. The directorate estimated that the travel time from Wugu (五股) to Tucheng (土城) would be reduced from one hour on regular roads to 12 minutes.
Shiah Ming-shen (夏明勝), a division chief at the DGH, said the section between Sianmin Boulevard and Wugu Interchange is about 5.1km long. He said that Banciao District residents can access the Tucheng Interchange by taking advantage of the shortcut. It could also help ease the congestion at the Jhonghe (中和) Interchange, he added.
Congestion soon emerged at the Wugu-Jhongjheng Rd section when the DGH opened it to traffic last year. Regarding the complaints, Shiah said that motorists flocked to the highway because they wanted to try driving on a new road.
“The traffic on the highway is more balanced now,” he said. “Motorists have learned to choose the roads that serve them the best.”
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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