The Taipei Department of Transportation yesterday said it would deliver a proposal to the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to increase the difficulty of scooter license qualification tests to reduce fatalities related to scooter accidents, particularly those of teenagers and older people.
The city recorded 74 fatalities caused by road accidents from January to last month, about the same number of fatalities as the number of deaths recorded during the same period last year, statistics released by the department showed.
Of the people killed in road accidents, 23 were pedestrians, prompting Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), who chaired the department meeting, to ask: “Why have so many people died just walking on the streets?”
Department Commissioner Chung Hui-yu (鍾慧諭) said older people constituted the majority of fatalities that occurred when crossing the street.
Chung said that more than 1,000 road accidents during the period involved residents between the ages of 16 and 18, of which 90 percent were scooter accidents, indicating that the problem of teenagers riding scooters without licenses has been rampant.
By law, Taiwanese must be at least 18 years old to take scooter license tests, she said.
Ko, apparently agitated by the issue, ordered the Taipei Department of Education to call its New Taipei City counterpart and work toward a mutual goal of reducing scooter-related fatalities, as about 50 percent of high-school students living in New Taipei City commute to Taipei for school.
To boost motorists’ compliance with traffic regulations, Chung said that her department would make an appeal to the ministry to expand the scope of both written and practical tests that people are required to pass to obtain scooter licenses by adding questions that evaluate test-takers’ attention to pedestrians’ safety.
“My goal is to have every scooter rider retake the test,” she said.
Chung said her department would play promotional videos at public nursing homes to raise senior citizens’ awareness of the dangers of crossing the street.
She also recommended that older people wear bright-colored clothes to improve their visibility to avoid being hit by cars.
In other developments, a NT$1 hike in bus fares, originally scheduled to take effect in March next year, has been delayed to the fourth quarter of 2017 due to possible fare changes related to planned bus route adjustments and the required resetting of card readers.
Meanwhile, Ko said that the scheduled demolition of a ramp leading to the Zhongxiao Bridge (忠孝橋) on Zhongxiao W Road would be documented by the Discovery Channel.
The ramp is to be torn down over the first eight days of the Lunar New Year holiday in February.
Saying that the “massive” scale of work involved in the project would be the Taipei City Government’s “legacy,” Ko encouraged Taipei Public Works Department officials to “do your best,” adding: “I will visit you every day.”
Ko said that Public Works Department Commissioner Pong Cheng-sheng (彭振聲) had asked the project’s contractor to purchase new uniforms for its workers due to the filming, which the department said was aimed at ensuring workers’ safety and upholding the nation’s image.
Experts believe that the demolition of the ramp will improve the often heavily congested traffic conditions near Taipei Railway Station.
It was one of the first policies proposed by Ko following his election last year.
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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