Far Eastern Toll Collection Co (FETC) yesterday said that the daily usage rate of the electronic toll collection (ETC) system has reached an average of 94.02 percent within two months after the nation launched the “pay-as-you go” toll fee scheme.
“It [the usage rate] was not an easy accomplishment, given that it took Japan 10 years to have an ETC usage rate of 89 percent. Singapore, on the other hand, has stipulated in law that the usage rate must reach 100 percent,” FETC managing director Chang Yung-chang (張永昌) said.
Despite technical glitches during its initial stage, the toll fee collection contractor passed the inspections of an independent performance review committee two weeks in a row, with its accuracy in toll fee charges topping 99.9994 percent and 99.9997 percent respectively.
FETC vice president of technology Richard Wu (吳忠潔) said that erroneous charges now occur mostly with non-eTag users, as the company can only charge them after it verifies license plates using image-recognition technology.
Errors occurred if the paint on the license plate had begun to fall off or if the license plates were partially damaged, Wu said.
“Owing to these problems with license plates, our system might misread the English letters or the numbers on the plates and in turn wrongfully charge the drivers,” Wu said.
To avoid such errors, Wu said that the company has employed several mobile image-recognition systems to ensure accurate reading of the license plates. It has also formed a database that lists all the problematic license plates detected.
“We have reinforced the training of our personnel on the recognition of the car license plates, particularly on the procedures to ensure accurate reading of the plates,” Wu said.
In other developments, traffic on the southbound lanes of the nation’s freeways will start to be congested this afternoon as people prepare for the three-day 228 Memorial Day holiday.
The National Freeway Bureau said that the heaviest traffic would occur tomorrow and on Saturday, with the traffic volume on the freeway potentially reaching between 2.2 million and 2.4 million vehicles a day.
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