Badly fitted truck wing mirrors and side guards caused an estimated 40 deaths a year between 2006 and this year, the Control Yuan said.
The government’s top watchdog has asked the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) to make improvements by subsidizing installation or insurance costs for truck owners, or cutting taxes to speed up the replacement of old vehicle parts.
Although the ministry has made many amendments to the safety standards of side mirrors and side guards on large vehicles, the newer and stricter regulations are only applicable to licensed trucks that were imported or manufactured after the changes to the regulations, which accounts for only about 10 percent of the total number, Control Yuan member Lee Ful-dien (李復甸) said on Tuesday.
Even though there are still many hazardous vehicle parts among the remaining 90 percent of licensed trucks in the country, the ministry has not implemented support measures, Lee said.
Lee said that when he was working as a lawyer 30 years ago, his first case concerned a person who was disabled after they were struck by a truck mirror.
Safety regulations for such mirrors have not improved over the past 30 years, he said.
Meanwhile, a separate Control Yuan report on tour buses published earlier this week has highlighted the need to formulate a strategy for retiring old tour buses.
As of June, there were 13,270 tour buses in Taiwan. Of these, 31 percent were more than 10 years old, 23.6 percent were more than 12 years old, 11.3 percent were more than 15 years old and 2.35 percent were more than 20 years old, Control Yuan member Cheng Jen-hung (程仁宏) said.
According to current regulations, tour buses that are more than 12 years old are not allowed on mountain roads and must not exceed speeds of 90kph on highways.
However, not a single case has been brought to date, indicating that the Directorate-General of Highways has been ineffective in implementing its regulations, Cheng said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift