The government has launched an international tendering competition to solicit designs for the planned Tamkang Bridge (淡江大橋) in New Taipei City, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications said yesterday.
Following the first competition conference in Hamburg, Germany, last month, a second was held yesterday in Tokyo and a third is scheduled to be held in San Francisco on Wednesday, according to the Directorate-General of Highways (DGH).
The submissions will undergo first-stage screening in May and the finalists will be announced in August, the DGH said.
The government said it hopes that the Tamkang Bridge will be a new landmark — on a par with the Golden Gate Bridge in California and the Sydney Harbour Bridge — when it is completed in 2020.
The Tamkang Bridge will span the estuary of the Tamsui River (淡水河), connecting Tamsui (淡水) and Bali (八里) districts, which are popular tourist destinations particularly famous for views of the sunset over the Taiwan Strait.
At 6km long and 44m wide, the bridge is to later accommodate a light-rail track between Tamsui and Bali.
At present, the two districts are linked mainly by the Guandu Bridge (關渡橋), which is about 10km upstream.
When the new bridge is completed, the driving distance between Tamsui and Bali will be shortened by 15km, with travel time reduced by 25 minutes during peak hours, according to New Taipei City’s transportation department.
Overall, it will improve Tamsui’s transportation network and help ease traffic congestion, the department added.
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:
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