Minister of Transportation and Communications Chen Jian-yu (陳建宇) said the ministry and the nation’s six special municipalities would form a data technology team to integrate, analyze and share the “big data” collected from smart cards.
By analyzing the integrated dataset, Chen said, solutions to various traffic problems, including easing congestion at bottleneck road sections, could be found which might help reduce traffic accident casualties.
Chen made the statement at a panel discussion hosted by the Institute of Transportation, in which officials from the transportation departments in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung talked about using the datasets from smart cards to manage transport systems and improve transport services.
“The ministry has applied the integrated data from transport departments, hotels and the weather bureau to estimate the travel time for drivers on Freeway No. 5,” Chen said. “In the future, the large dataset could also help bus companies enhance the efficiency of their operations and change their business models.”
Chen said the ministry would push to establish a platform in which transportation officials could share traffic data. He said that the platform would also allow public transport system, statistics and information science experts to work together, adding that the local and central government officials would meet regularly to exchange data and enable the government to determine new transport management policies.
Taipei City’s Department of Transportation Director Chung Hui-yu (鍾慧諭) said the government should use eTags — the tag used to access the electronic toll collection system — for vehicle management, from driving on the freeways to paying for parking. She said a similar policy should be enforced on the public transport system as well, with the entire nation using only one smart card.
“In the past, each county had its own smart card developed by different developers. We will have no future if we keep wasting resources fighting against each other and do not consolidate the information,” Chung said. “We need to work together and strive to export this technology to other countries.”
Both Taoyuan and Taichung had expressed a desire to use the data to re-evaluate bus routes, with the latter saying that it would rearrange 206 bus routes operating in the city.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the