The Taiwan Lantern Festival boosted ridership of the high-speed rail system, with passenger volume exceeding 260,000 during the three-day 228 Memorial Day holiday weekend.
The Taiwan High Speed Rail Corp said that a large number of travelers used the system to see the lantern festival this year, due to the venue’s proximity to the high-speed rail station in Taoyuan.
About 267,000 passengers used the system on Sunday, a new record since it began operations in 2007, company statistics showed.
The high-speed rail’s Taoyuan Station was on that day packed with hundreds of thousands of visitors arriving from other regions to attend the festival.
According to the firm, Taoyuan Station is used by about 25,000 passengers on a regular weekday.
In order to avoid potential accidents due to overcrowding at the station, the company said that it had to slightly postpone trains’ departure times from Taoyuan Station to ensure travelers had sufficient time to disembark.
Staff at the station were also instructed to manage the number of passengers inside the facility, it added.
The record number of daily high-speed rail passengers came less than two months after the previous high of 249,000 on Jan. 3.
Commenting on the January increase, the company attributed the surge in passengers to the addition of three new high-speed rail stations in Miaoli, Changhua and Yunlin counties.
High-speed rail passenger volume reached a daily average of 167,000 last month, compared with 148,000 in the same period last year, the company said, adding that the increase was largely due to the nine-day Lunar New Year holiday, the 228 Memorial Day holiday and the Taiwan Lantern Festival.
As the festival is scheduled to end this weekend, the company said that it would increase the number of trains in operation and postpone departure times if there are too many passengers.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater