An estimated 2.6 million vehicles hit the freeways yesterday as the nation entered the first day of the Tomb Sweeping long weekend.
The National Freeway Bureau said that the traffic was already slow at about 9am. The speed on southbound sections of freeways, including the section between Sanchong (三重) and Neili (內壢), as well as between Yangmei (楊梅) and Hsinchu on Freeway No. 1, was only 10kph to 30kph. A similar situation was also seen on sections of Freeway No. 3 and Freeway No. 5.
In the south, some of the northbound sections saw speeds drop to between 10kph and 20kph.
The slow traffic enraged some freeway users, who vented their frustration online.
“What the heck? It takes less than 10 minutes to drive from Jhonghe (中和) to Toucheng (土城) on a weekday. It took about 100 minutes today,” one driver posted on his Facebook page.
The bureau said that the first day of the holiday would see the heaviest traffic as people travel to clean family tombs and also make some short-distance trips.
The volume of traffic yesterday was forecast to hit 2.6 million vehicles, comparable to a Lunar New Year holiday.
The bureau said the freeways will be toll-free from midnight to 7am each day during the four-day holiday. Some of the hard shoulders, such as the one between Dashi (大溪) and Longtan (龍潭), are open to traffic between 7am and 7pm to ease congestion.
Meanwhile, the Central Weather Bureau forecast that the chance of rain would remain high on the west coast, as well as in the northeast, both today and tomorrow due to a frontal system that arrived on Wednesday.
While the rain is likely to ease on Sunday, a cold air mass is forecast to arrive tomorrow night and lower temperatures nationwide, 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:
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