A three-rail terminal that combines the nation’s railway, high-speed rail and access to the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit system, Taipei Railway Station seems unable to shake off notoriety for its bewildering direction signs that often hinder travelers in a rush, despite an ongoing improvement project that cost the Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) more than NT$23 million (US$788,000).
Tang Sheng-han (唐聖瀚), an assistant professor at National Taiwan Normal University’s (NTNU) Graduate Institute of Design who carried out on-site tests of the station’s signs for two years, said the project only appears to have worsened the situation.
“According to actual time calculation, a first-timer who has just arrived at the station would have to spend at least 14 minutes to find their way,” Tang said. “Yet, things are even worse for wheelchair-bound travelers, who, according to last year’s test results, waste an average of 28 minutes trying to find the right direction. This year, the time lengthened to an absurd one hour and 17 minutes.”
Photo: Tsai Wei-chi, Taipei Times
Tang said the disorientation problem prevalent at the country’s busiest station could incur substantial “time cost.”
Citing last year’s statistics released by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, which recorded the average monthly wage of Taiwanese employees at NT$45,642 (NT$4.75 per minute), Tang said that if the 500,000 travelers commuting daily through the station all spent seven minutes finding their way, their wasted time could translate to a cost of NT$16.62 million a day.
“That number could reach as much as NT$6.06 billion over the course of one year,” Tang said.
At an interactive course at NTNU, Tang had instructed a number of postgraduate students last year and this year to carry out an experiment at the station — purchasing tickets, buying bread on the underground shopping street, then getting to the final destination of Breeze Taipei Station, in a food court on the second floor.
Students were divided into two different groups, one traveling by wheelchair and the other on foot.
While the first group of students, traveling by wheelchair, accomplished their mission within half an hour last year, Tang said students who embarked on the same quest this April following the commencement of the improvement project spent an additional 50 minutes going through the routine.
“Some participants became irritated after having failed to find the right direction,” Tang said, adding that more time would be needed if students were to make a transfer.
Attributing the worsening results to the inaccurate direction signs to an elevator to the second floor, Tang said the signs were relocated from an already inconspicuous spot to a far more obscure place outdoors, with no relevant instructions positioned within the station.
“Our test results highlighted the dire situation faced by many passengers with disabilities at the labyrinthine station,” Tang added.
Meanwhile, the improvement project appears to neither help nor impede passengers traveling on foot, because the time needed for students to complete the mission on foot remained unchanged this year from last year, at about 14 minutes.
“The outcomes indicated that while the ongoing project has brought about some adjustments, they are not necessarily beneficial to travelers. Some signs are not only misleading, but also indicate a lack of judgement,” Tang said.
Station master Ku Shih-yen (古時彥) said that because the possibility of a three-rail terminal was not in the picture when the station was built, there is plenty of room for improvement in its design.
“We have entrusted a professional company to rearrange and redesign the direction signs, which is scheduled to be complete by next year’s Lunar New Year. By then, we believe the station will be transformed into a terminal with a friendly environment,” Ku said, pledging to prioritize improvement to the directional signs to the elevator.
In response, Tang said that while the modified signs were more appealing in appearance, they were lacking in practicality and user-friendliness.
“The devil is in the details. If the [TRA] continues failing to design the signs from a user perspective, and remains fixated on a mindset of egotism and convenience, no amount of money and no professional firm can ever make a change for the better,” Tang 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
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