A mobile-phone application developed by National Taipei University of Technology offers a free platform for people looking for others with whom to share a taxi or car.
Department of Electronic Engineering associate professor Huang Shih-chia (黃士嘉) said the application, BlueNet-Ride, was officially launched in September last year, adding that his research team has been studying car-pooling for five years.
“Because not too many people in Taiwan like the idea of sharing a cab or a road trip with complete strangers, we encourage people to organize trips in collaboration with Facebook friends,” Huang said.
“They can use BlueNet-Ride to find people to share a ride when they want to go to a restaurant, KTV bar or a music concert,” Huang said.
“In the same was as on the Facebook and Line applications, people can send instant messages to each other via BlueNet-Ride,” Huang added.
The team said that BlueNet-Ride is different from application-based transport network Uber, whose operation has met with controversy and has been banned in some places.
Passengers using BlueNet-Ride simply share the cost of the cab fare and pay drivers as they would normally, the team said, adding that people do not need to pay to use the app, as it is free to download.
Meanwhile, the university signed a memorandum of understanding with the Changhua County Government to help the ease traffic congestion on New Year’s Eve through use of the app, adding that the system processed almost 1,000 car-sharing requests per day leading up to Dec. 31 last year.
Studies focused on BlueNet-Ride have been published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, the university said.
The technology has been patented in both Taiwan and the US, it added.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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