The Railway Reconstruction Bureau (RRB) yesterday said a straight rail line connecting Taipei and Yilan was urgently needed as the current railway would only be able to handle 40 percent of passenger demand by 2031.
The section between Nangang and Cidu (七堵) on the Taipei-Yilan Railway is a bottleneck that is preventing efforts to increase passenger traffic along the east coast, the bureau said, adding that the section serves not only Keelung-Taipei commuters, but passengers traveling between the west and east coasts too.
There is no room for additional services along the Nangang-Cidu section during peak hours, which limits the number of trains that can be added to the current schedule.
The passenger load between the west and east coasts during holidays is expected to rise from about 145,000 per day at present to about 251,000 in 2031.
If nothing is done to ease the bottleneck, then three out of five passengers will board an east coast train without a confirmed seat —or about 1.49 million passengers a year, the bureau said.
A straight Taipei-to Yilan line could ease holiday traffic congestion on the Chiang Wei-shui Memorial Freeway (Freeway No. 5), it said. At present, driving from Taipei to Yilan on the freeway takes 110 minutes on holidays, the bureau said. With more tourists headed to the east coast during holidays, drivers could spend up to 150 minutes on the freeway, while local roads in Yilan and Jiaosi (礁溪) would become gigantic parking lots, it said.
The bureau wants to build a 53km-long rail line from Taipei’s Nangang District (南港) to Toucheng (頭城) in Yilan County, which would require new stations at Shuangsi (雙溪) and Wushi Harbor (烏石港) and renovations to theee existing stations.
The bureau is drafting its plan for the proposed line, which is due by the end of this month.
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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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