Taipei’s YouBike system will expand by 17 percent over the next three months, the city’s Department of Transportation said yesterday.
Use of the system has risen sharply this year, with monthly rides up from 1.5 million in January to 2.2 million last month, according to figures provided by the system’s operator, Giant Bicycles.
Total rides are expected to hit 30 million by next month, with more rides recorded this year than in all previous years combined, Giant said.
SONGSHAN MRT
Given the expected growth, the city signed a contract this month to add 28 new stations and 1,000 bicycles to the system by the end of the year, Department of Transportation division head Liu Chia-yu (劉嘉祐) said.
Many of the new stations are to be centered around the new Songshan MRT Line, he said.
SIDEWALK ROADBLOCKS
Finding sites for new stations remains a challenge, he added.
“The land we use has to be government property,” Giant spokesperson Liu Li-chu (劉麗珠) said, adding that a lot of sidewalk space is privately owned.
The company does not have the authority to negotiate for space with individual property owners, she said.
However, because the YouBike system is not legally considered part of the city’s public transportation system, the city has no legal authority to directly requisition land for new stations, she said.
LONG-TERM GOALS
Liu Chia-yu said the city will hold a series of meetings on each of the prospective station sites, adding that when the benefits of the system are explained, land owners are often willing to cooperate.
The city intends to add 60 more stations next year, with a long-term goal of having 300 stations city-wide, he 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