The remaining Greyhound buses that are still in use are scheduled to cease operating on Thursday next week after being in service for 37 years, according to Kuo Kuang Motor Transportation Corp.
The freeway bus operator said that it would sell Greyhound bus tickets to people wanting to keep them as memorabilia. Meanwhile, two Greyhound buses are to go on display at its bus depot near the Taipei Railway Station. One of them is the first Greyhound bus in the nation, which was remodeled to carry 20 bicycles and 20 passengers. The other one is to be converted into an art gallery, showcasing various photographs of Greyhound buses taken over the past 37 years.
In addition, five Greyhound buses are to be used to carry people who wish to have one last ride on them. People must to reserve tickets for the bus tours, which are to travel between Taipei Railway Station and Dajia Riverside Park.
Company manager Wu Chung-si (吳忠錫) said that the National Sun Yat-Sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1) was opened for traffic in 1978 and the Directorate General of Highways (DGH), which owned the company at the time, purchased 50 Greyhound buses from Des Plaines, Illinois-based Motor Coach Industries, Wu said.
Wu said Greyhound buses were renamed Kuo Kuang coaches, which literally means the “glory of the nation.” They were used to carry passengers from Taipei to Kaohsiung and were the main means of transportation connecting the north to the south due to limited rail transport capacity at the time, he said.
Wu said that the company had owned 480 Greyhound buses, adding that the coaches were not as fuel-efficient as other buses and are expensive to maintain.
“Other buses can run 3km to 4.5km on one liter of gasoline, but Greyhound buses can only run 1km per liter. We also had to import vehicle parts from the US, so maintenance costs of Greyhound buses were three to four times higher than those of other buses,” Wu said.
He said the company phased out the use of the buses, adding that the number of Greyhound buses was down to 300 by 2010.
Kuo Kuang coaches were known for employing female service attendants onboard.
A military affairs official claimed that the buses’ engines could be removed and reinstalled in military tanks, so when the nation severed official diplomatic ties with the US in 1979, the government bought more Greyhound buses to beef up supplies of back-up engines for tanks.
Wu said that the number of the Greyhound buses dwindled to 33 last year. Fourteen are still being used to carry passengers between Taipei and Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
He said that the company would keep five buses to provide tours for bus fans, while others would be donated to the DGH for public display. The rest would be sold, Wu said, adding that the body of a Greyhound bus is worth NT$600,000 to NT$700,000.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: