People will soon be able to board Taiwan Railway Administration (TRA) trains in 64 stations nationwide with their EasyCards, Taiwan EasyGo cards, I Pass cards or electronic toll collection (ETC) cards, the railway said yesterday.
Currently, passengers can use EasyCards, Taiwan EasyGo cards and ETC cards at 51 TRA train stations. Starting tomorrow, 13 more stations will be added to the list and I Pass card holders will be able to use the card to board TRA trains as well.
The I Pass is the Kaohsiung MRT system’s version of the Taipei MRT’s EasyCard electronic ticket; Taiwan EasyGo cards are used by bus commuters between Taoyuan to Nantou counties, as well as between Hualien and Taitung counties; and ETC cards are issued by Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co for freeway users.
The TRA said that multiple card readers would be installed at all train stations from Fulong (福隆) to Miaoli in the north and between Houbi (後壁) and Jhongjhou (中洲) in the south. All stations along the Lioujia (六家) and Shalun (沙崙) lines, as well as Jhudong (竹東) and Neiwan (內灣) stations on the Neiwan line will also be equipped with the readers.
TRA statistics show that the number of passengers using electronic tickets has reached 200,000 per day.
In other developments, the Railway Reconstruction Bureau yesterday said that the renovation of Taitung Station has been scheduled to begin next month.
The aim of the project is to create separate passages for commuters entering and exiting the station, it said, adding that the platforms are also to be decorated using the totems of the Puyuma people, one of the main Aboriginal tribes in Taitung County.
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