The Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) yesterday said it would conduct a feasibility study this year on a proposal to extend high-speed rail (HSR) services to Pingtung County.
The study is to include technical and legal issues, land acquisition, costs and environmental impact among other details, the Railway Reconstruction Bureau said.
When the report is completed, it will be presented to the Cabinet for consideration, the bureau said.
The high-speed rail system, which began commercial operations in 2007, stretches 350km between terminal stations in Taipei’s Nangang District (南港) and Kaohsiung’s Zuoying District (左營), with 10 stations in between.
The proposal to extend the line to Pingtung was proposed by Pingtung County Commissioner Pan Men-an (潘孟安) of the Democratic Progressive Party.
However, Minister of Transportation and Communications Hochen Tan (賀陳旦) said this week that conditions are not yet right for such a project and that the ministry has no plans to make it a priority.
Pan yesterday said Hochen’s comments showed that the minister was looking at the proposal from a Taipei perspective and he had hurt the feelings of Pingtung residents by responding to their request with a “cold and arrogant” attitude.
Pingtung residents pay the same taxes as other people, but do not have access to convenient transportation, Pan said.
Pingtung’s rail services are older than those in Hualien and Taitung counties, while its air services are not as good as in offshore counties, he said.
Pan said that the development of Taiwan’s transportation network would be far from comprehensive if it focused only on urban regions and ignored rural areas.
Pingtung has a population of about 835,000.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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