Taiwan’s road surfaces are almost as good as Japan’s, with the only difference being design, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said yesterday.
Ko made the remark after visiting a road construction site yesterday morning.
In preparation for the Taipei Summer Universiade in August, in which more than 12,000 athletes from 148 countries are expected to participate, the city’s Public Works Department has begun road improvement projects near sports venues and started building roads and bridges to connect the athletes’ village in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口) to Taipei.
Photo: CNA
Cityscape improvement and road surface renewal on Zhongshan N Road, Sec. 3 and Huanhe N Road, Sec 2, including 9,193m2 of road base improvements and 32,768m2 of road milling and paving, began on April 17 and are expected to be completed by June 30.
Taiwan has pipelines under many of its roads, Ko said during a visit to a construction site yesterday.
“I think that if pipelines are moved under sidewalks there would be less chance of having to excavate roads after they are paved,” he said.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
“We need to revise our urban planning,” Ko said. “It is a problem people did not think about 50 years ago, so now we can only make gradual modifications. Urban construction takes time.”
Public Works Department commissioner Wang Wen-ching (王文清) said Zhongshan N Road usually has high traffic flow, so road renewal is conducted between 10pm and 6am to reduce negative effects on city traffic.
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