With parking fees to be levied on people using parking spaces in Taipei’s alleys next month, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday said that the fees might be waived on weekends and in the evening, as well as in narrow alleys.
Ko made the remarks during a city council question-and-answer session with Taipei City Councilor Chen Cheng-chung (陳政忠), an independent.
Citing a survey conducted by Ming Chuan University School of Management, Chen said that about half of the respondents said they do not think parking fees would help improve traffic.
Fifty-four percent of respondents expressed disapproval of the new regulations, while 40 percent were in favor of it, the survey showed.
As people who use alley parking spaces at night are predominantly nearby residents, Chen asked Ko if the city government could collect parking fees in alleys measuring 8m in width from 9am to 5pm on weekdays, to reduce the cost of parking for residents.
The city should also waive parking fees in alleys less than 6m wide, Chen said.
He asked the Taipei Parking Management and Development Office not to add any new spaces in such alleys yet, saying that doing so would obstruct traffic.
Chen said that the city should prioritize the needs of physically challenged people and shuttle buses used by childcare centers to use narrow alleys, and asked Ko to zone out pedestrian lanes in such alleys.
Ko agreed to all of Chen’s requests, but said that if residents felt the need to levy parking fees to deter people from occupying parking spaces over prolonged periods of time, the city would reinstate its plans to do so.
Office division chief Cheng Li-shu (鄭麗淑) said that, originally, about 10,000 alley parking spaces would have been subject to the tolling system, but since narrow alleys have now been excluded, the estimate would be reduced.
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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