The Taipei City Government will revise river dredging plans, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
“Even though funding might be the same, dredging plans will change to focus on allowing boats to enter and exit docks,” Ko said, adding that previous dredging of the river channel had not had any effect.
The Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister paper) yesterday reported that the city government had spent NT$250 million (US$8.09 million) over the past 10 years on river dredging as part of plans to promote tourism through boat rides on the Tamsui River (淡水河), which courses through the Taipei Basin.
More than 80,000 people took the river tours last year, according to Department of Transportation figures.
Chen Juin-hong (陳俊宏), section head of the department’s general transportation section, said that even the river tour line’s small boats have to carefully coordinate departure times with tides to avoid being stranded.
He denied a media report that more than 60 percent of river line passengers were schoolchildren on field trips, saying that while the city government covers the tickets of schoolchildren, they make up only 6 percent of passengers.
He added that while the business of the private line operators licensed by the city was “poor,” the city government did not require them to report profit figures.
Chen said the city government has already approved a new river tour route along the city’s Keelung River (基隆河) between the Xikou (錫口) and Guandu (關渡) docks. Operation is scheduled to begin by the end of the year pending city approval of the boat being constructed by the line’s operator, he said.
Hydraulic Engineering Office Director Chen Shyh-haw (陳世浩) said his office had not attempted to make the Tamsui River passable at all times due to the prohibitive cost that would entail and that he would review dredging operations following Ko’s directive.
SECURITY: Starlink owner Elon Musk has taken pro-Beijing positions, and allowing pro-China companies to control Taiwan’s critical infrastructure is risky, a legislator said Starlink was reluctant to offer services in Taiwan because of the nation’s extremely high penetration rates in 4G and 5G services, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said yesterday. The ministry made the comments at a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee, which reviewed amendments to Article 36 of the Telecommunications Management Act (電信管理法). Article 36 bans foreigners from holding more than 49 percent of shares in public telecommunications networks, while shares foreigners directly and indirectly hold are also capped at 60 percent of the total, unless specified otherwise by law. The amendments, sponsored by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Ko
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
The eastern extension of the Taipei MRT Red Line could begin operations as early as late June, the Taipei Department of Rapid Transit Systems said yesterday. Taipei Rapid Transit Corp said it is considering offering one month of free rides on the new section to mark its opening. Construction progress on the 1.4km extension, which is to run from the current terminal Xiangshan Station to a new eastern terminal, Guangci/Fengtian Temple Station, was 90.6 percent complete by the end of last month, the department said in a report to the Taipei City Council's Transportation Committee. While construction began in October 2016 with an
NON-RED SUPPLY: Boosting the nation’s drone industry is becoming increasingly urgent as China’s UAV dominance could become an issue in a crisis, an analyst said Taiwan’s drone exports to Europe grew 41.7-fold from 2024 to last year, with demand from Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression the most likely driver of growth, a study showed. The Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) in a statement on Wednesday said it found that many of Taiwan’s uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) sales were from Poland and the Czech Republic. These countries likely transferred the drones to Ukraine to aid it in its fight against the Russian invasion that started in 2022, it said. Despite the gains, Taiwan is not the dominant drone exporter to these markets, ranking second and fourth
RSS