The Ministry of Transportation and Communications on Tuesday denied claims that the delayed Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT System would be launched soon because the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is in power, adding that it is forming an ad hoc group with the Taoyuan City Government to facilitate the launch of the system.
The ministry made the remarks after a story published by the Journalist weekly magazine cited a source as saying that Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) knew before he took office that the Bureau of High Speed Rail and Taoyuan Metro Corp had agreed to launch the system at standards lower than those stated in the contract.
The magazine said that Taoyuan Metro had previously identified 4,522 issues with the airport MRT system, but the list shrank to 2,222 after the DPP government took office on May 20.
The way the pan-green camp pushed for the launch of the system was a political spectacle, the magazine said.
The MRT Final Inspection and Testing for Revenue Service (大眾捷運系統履勘作業要點) regulations do not require the company to test the system based on the standards stated in the contract, which requires that the system must be able to dispatch an express train every three minutes and a regular train every 12 minutes, the article said.
If the company and the bureau had agreed to dispatch trains every 12 minutes at the initial stage of operation, and if the system had a proven availability of 99 percent, the MRT line could be launched, despite not being able to dispatch trains as frequently as stated in the contract, it added.
The ministry denied the magazine’s claim, saying it has formed an investigative committee to inspect the MRT system and address the doubts that people might have about it following the passage of a resolution at the Legislative Yuan.
The committee spent two months addressing issues facing the system and has made progress in raising its operational speed, reducing errors, increasing its stability, and making sure that it passes passenger and luggage load stress tests, the ministry said.
The committee in a meeting on Aug. 27 said that the number of obstacles that prevented the system from being launched has been reduced, adding that the operator can apply for a final inspection of the system after completing a stability test.
The company is to execute simulations on the system and seek independent validation from a third party before it launches the system, the ministry said, adding that it has done everything in accordance with legal procedures.
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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