Starting on Friday next week, drivers who leave their cars idling for more than three minutes risk being fined, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) said yesterday.
Vehicles idling in parking lots, on roads or in other areas should have their engines turned off if they stay in the same spot for more than three minutes, the regulations stipulate.
Violators will be fined NT$1,500 for motorcycles, NT$3,000 for small vehicles and NT$5,000 for large vehicles.
Hsieh Yein-rui (謝燕儒), director of air quality protection and noise control at the EPA, said local environmental protection bureaus have since March dispatched hundreds of personnel to inform drivers about the policy change.
They focused on locations where drivers are most likely to idle, including schools, hospitals, bus and railway stations, hotels, shopping malls and tourist attractions.
“We found that most drivers did not turn off their engines as soon as they parked, because they were expecting someone,” Hsieh said. “They might also stop the car to discuss something or to rest, or they did not switch off the engines as a matter of convenience.”
Hsieh said the benefit of enacting such a policy went beyond clean air. The EPA estimated drivers could save 640 liters of gas per year if they cut idling time by 30 minutes a day, he said.
This translated into savings of NT$21,000 per year, he added.
“There are 6 million registered car owners in Taiwan,” Hsieh said. “If only one-tenth of them decide to cut idling time by 30 minutes daily, they could save NT$12 billion [US$405 million] per year.”
Hsieh said exceptions would be made to vehicles carrying children, the elderly or passengers with special medical conditions, adding that officials enforcing the regulations would assess the circumstances and determine if the driver should be fined.
Motorists are advised to change their driving habits to avoid being fined.
As some parking lots offer 30-minute free parking deals, they could park their cars and wait for the persons they were supposed to pick up at a train or bus station.
Motorists can also call or text people to reduce their waiting time.
“It is unfair that drivers sit inside their cars with the air-conditioning on and pedestrians have to breathe in the exhaust fumes they produce,” he said.
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
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
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