Taipei Deputy Mayor Chen Ching-jun (陳景峻) yesterday questioned the realiability of the Taipei Police Department’s statistics on traffic violations and faulted the Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC) for removing seats on MRT carriages to boost passenger capacity.
TRTC vice president Chan Shih-tsung (詹仕聰) told review of the city’s transportation policies that the MRT Wenhu Line could handle passenger volumes during morning rush hour over the past four months, as the company had increased the number of services and boosted capacity.
He was interrupted by the deputy mayor, who said that a test carried out by the TRTC on Wenhu Line carriages’ seating was an “unnecessary” move, and that the company only conducted the test to avoid offending Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲).
When Chan said the experiment was conducted under Ko’s instruction, Chen accused the company of attempting to shift its responsibility, saying Ko simply asked for TRTC’s input on the possibility of alleviating crowding.
Chan said that an evaluation of the seating is ongoing and that the TRTC would give Ko a definite answer next month.
Chen took issue with Taipei Police Department statistics on the number of traffic violations issued last month.
Comparing the statistics with those in April, Chen said that the numbers were too close and could have been rigged.
For example, the total number of drunk-driving cases was 1,048 last month and 1,077 this month, and the total number of traffic violations recorded last month and this month was 24,047 last month and 24,098 respectively, he said.
Zhongzheng District Second Precinct Chief Yang Hung-cheng (楊鴻正) said that the number of traffic violations are in direct proportion to the size of a precinct’s staff and the overall development level of an area.
He said the number of drunk-driving cases are affected by the number of night markets and restaurants in a district, which likely produced the close numbers.
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