The National Freeway Bureau yesterday revealed the key performance indicators (KPI) it will use to evaluate the operation of the electronic toll collection system, adding that Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (FETC) could face fines of NT$500,000 per day if any errors are found in the transactions.
The bureau decided to launch a three-month evaluation of the toll collection system after a series of transaction errors occurred in the accounts for the eTags, the toll tags drivers must use to access the toll collection system.
Bureau Deputy Director-General Wu Mu-fu (吳木富) said the bureau has formed a special committee for the evaluation, which consists of seven members. Their expertise ranges from transportation management and legal affairs to information management, he said.
Currently, FETC’s contract with the government states that the fee collection success rate must reach 99.8 percent and the toll charge accuracy must exceed 99 percent.
Wu said the evaluation this time only targets the problem of drivers sometimes being charged for the same trip twice, and the standards used in the evaluation will be stricter than the thresholds stipulated in the contract.
Wu said members of the committee had stipulated that the occurrence of the stated error must not exceed 0.1 percent on a single toll collection gantry.
“Aside from looking at the percentage of error at one gantry, the committee members will randomly select six or seven gantries along the freeways per day during the evaluation. All the data collected through the sampled gantries must not have this type of error at a rate of more than 0.02 percent. Should the FETC fail to meet any of these standards, the penalty is NT$500,000 per day,” he said.
National Chiao Tung University associate professor and inspection committee spokesperson Huang Tai-sheng (黃台生) said that the committee can only produce valid results if the daily sample contains at least 20,000 transactions. Huang added that there are 319 gantries along the freeways, and on average, each gantry would be inspected twice between Saturday and April 30.
“At each gantry, we will sample the cars driven through it within 10 minutes and calculate the percentage of errors by adding up the gantries we sample that day,” Huang said. “So suppose 3,000 cars pass through one gantry per day, the company would fail the evaluation if three such errors were recorded. If we sample seven gantries, which could produce 21,000 transactions, then there must not be more than four errors recorded.”
The inspection committee will determine if FETC has passed or failed the evaluation.
While inspecting the operations at the bureau yesterday, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) reminded the agency to “be on high alert” during the Lunar New Year holiday, as this is the first major holiday after the nation launched its “pay as you go” policy and the toll-free hours have been extended from seven to 10 hours.
The bureau said that homebound traffic had started to appear at 3pm yesterday. Cars were moving slowly on the southbound sections between Jubei (竹北) and Hsinchu and between Wangtien (王田) and Changhua on National Sun Yat Sen Freeway and between Hsinchu and Chiedong interchanges on National Formosa Freeway.
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