Results of a preliminary inspection of the much-delayed Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport MRT system are scheduled to be released today, moving the project one step closer to an official launch.
The Bureau of High Speed Rail, which administered the inspection, said that experts inspecting the system were satisfied with what they saw on Saturday and yesterday, adding it also administered tests to the staff of the MRT system to observe how they responded to various hypothetical situations.
The scenarios included problems with the train system, the power supply, signaling and emergencies, the bureau said.
Experts were scheduled to discuss the results of the inspection last night, and the results were to be made public today.
Based on its administrative procedures, the Taoyuan Metro Corp is supposed to address any shortfalls that are picked up by the inspection.
The company may apply for a final inspection of the system from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) after it fixes any problems. The company can then decide the official launch date of the system once it receives confirmation that any problems have been sufficiently addressed.
The bureau said no major problems were discovered by the inspectors.
Earlier this year, MOTC Minister Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said that the new MRT system would be launched “during the first half of the first six months of next year.”
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Cheng Yun-peng (鄭運鵬) said on Facebook that the DPP inherited “a mess,” from the previous administration and that there were no easy solutions to the predicament.
The project has encountered several challenges in the past two decades, including a change of the contractor in charge of the project and the government’s repeated failures to launch the system on the dates it promised.
The DPP administration established a taskforce in June, which finished a comprehensive examination of the system in August and identified 4,000 shortcomings, Cheng said.
The operator managed to raise the reliability of the system to more than 99 percent, which enabled it to reach the threshold sufficient for a preliminary inspection.
“Who can say now that the DPP has no performance to show? Who can say now that Hochen Tan is not qualified to be MOTC minister?” Cheng said.
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