The freeway electronic toll collection performance review committee yesterday gave Far Eastern Electronic Toll Collection Co (FETC) a passing grade, adding that two errors that appeared in the sample were caused by false identification of the car license plates.
Huang Tai-sheng (黃台生), a former professor at National Chiao Tung University who served as the committee’s spokesperson, said that the committee examined more than 350,000 transactions recorded by the toll collection gantries as motor vehicles passed them from Feb. 1 to Feb. 4.
“We think that the contractor is doing alright based on its performances on these four days,” Huang said.
“However, we have to evaluate its performance over a three-month period, so we have to see how it performs by the end of that period,” he said.
Only two transaction errors were detected when the committee examined the data, one on Feb. 1 and the other on Feb. 3, he said.
In both cases, the cars were driven by non-eTag users, which means FETC has to use image recognition technology to identify the license plates.
“In one case, the system misinterpreted letters ‘NW’ as ‘MW’ because the paint on the lower part of the letter ‘N’ had fallen off. In the other case, an ‘E’ was identified as an ‘F’ because a white-light spot covered the bottom line of the ‘E,’ Huang said.
“The drivers [of the misidentified vehicles] in both cases were charged even though they did not drive through the road sections listed in the transactions,” he said.
If the company fails to meet the standards set by the review committee, it will be penalized NT$500,000 per day.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
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