The date for completion of the Airport Rail project between Sanchong (三重) and Jhongli (中壢) has been postponed until October next year due to a delay in the construction of a depot, the Bureau of High Speed Rail said yesterday.
Bureau Director-General Chu Shu (朱旭) said the contractor building the system’s Lujhu Depot must change the design of the facility after a review by the zoning committee.
The contractor must also fulfill a commitment it made to the Environmental Protection Administration’s environmental impact committee by refilling the excess soil dug out during the building of the airport rail at the construction site of the Lujhu Depot, Chu said.
The construction of the depot cannot begin until the contractor has thoroughly fulfilled its commitment, he said.
“The bureau has strictly reviewed the causes of delay that cannot be attributed to the contractor and has agreed that the contractor may complete the construction of the Sanchong-Jhongli section by October next year,” Chu said, adding that the bureau has established a special task force to supervise the contractor.
The construction of the 53km railway line, which will connect Taipei Railway Station and Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, began in 2006. The section between Taipei Railway Station and Sanchong is scheduled to be completed by August 2014.
As of last month, 81 percent of the Airport Rail project had been completed.
In other news, the National Freeway Bureau said yesterday the speed limit on Freeway No. 6 will be raised to 100kph starting tomorrow, but that drivers of cargo trucks weighing more than 20 tonnes must still observe the speed limit of 90kph.
The freeway, which connects Greater Taichung’s Wufong (霧峰) and Puli (埔里), is 37.6km long. It was opened for traffic in March 2009. The bureau said it initially set the speed limit at 90kph on the freeway because motorists might need some time to familiarize themselves with the routes leading to the freeway.
After re-evaluating the traffic situation on the freeway, it decided that the speed limit could be raised to its designed capacity of 100kph, the bureau 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:
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