Uber Taiwan yesterday published an advertisement in two Chinese-language newspapers to protest against proposed amendments to the Highway Act (公路法) that would increase the penalty for illegal transport service operators from NT$150,000 to NT$25 million (US$4,717 to US$786,114).
The ride-sharing application developer paid for a half-page advertisement on the front page of the Apple Daily and the Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper).
The advertisement used photographs of people Uber said are its drivers, including parents, pensioners and those who have other regular jobs.
“We embrace the power of moving the nation forward, but the government is imposing a NT$25 million penalty as a barrier,” the company said in the advertisement, adding that Taiwan cannot afford to have a backward-moving policy.
The advertisement urged people to sign a petition asking the government to amend the Highway Act by listing Uber, LetsRide, Lalamove and other ride-sharing applications as “Internet transport service providers,” which have yet to exist in the current legal framework.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津) said in the legislature’s Transportation Committee meeting that what Uber did would only cause public authority to collapse.
DPP Legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) said that Uber did not buy the advertisements to promote its business, but to stop the Legislative Yuan from increasing fines.
“It appears that the company is finally showing some signs of concern over the increase in fines against it. However, the advertisement also shows that it is reluctant to join the diversified taxi service proposed by the government,” he said.
Cheng said that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications’ diversified taxi service plan would regulate Uber based on the current laws, ensuring that both passengers and drivers are insured and compensated, and that Uber pays taxes in Taiwan.
For the government’s plan to work the ride-sharing application must match service requests with taxi drivers from different taxi service providers and allow drivers to make a reasonable profit, Cheng said.
“The key is that both the ministry and I believe that Uber can continue to operate as long as it follows the rules. All the rulings handed down to the company only ask that it operate legally. This is how the government handles all illegal operations in all sectors,” he said.
“I hope that Taiwanese service operators can compete against multinational companies like Uber, so long as it is done legally,” he said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS