A pedestrian overpass on the intersection of Xinyi and Keelung roads close to Taipei 101 could be demolished next year due to its low usage, the Taipei Department of Public Works said.
Taipei Department of Public Works Maintenance Section head Chen Bing-lin (陳炳麟) said that in October last year zebra crossings were added to the intersection under the L-shaped overpass and now about 90 percent of pedestrians have stopped using the overpass and it is nearly redundant.
Chen said the department would submit a budget request for the demolition of the overpass to the Taipei City Council in September.
He said that the department in January sealed off the overpass for 21 days to test the response and that it received a dozen e-mails of complaint from city residents, most of whom were photography enthusiasts who wanted to take time-lapse photographs of the traffic flowing past Taipei 101.
He said that the demolition would improve the urban landscape.
The city has since 2012 embarked on a project to tear down overpasses and seal off underground passages that are rarely used, with eight overpasses and nine underground passages to be decommissioned this year at a cost of NT$35 million (US$1.07 milliom), Chen said.
The city has 79 overpasses, with the 46-year-old one next to Xing Ya Elementary School in Xinyi District (信義) being the oldest, Chen said, adding that it is to be preserved due to its historical status.
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
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
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