Traffic was heavy yesterday morning on many freeways as the four-day National Day holiday began, real-time data from the Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau showed.
The most heavily affected roads were in northern Taiwan, where travel speeds on some of the southbound lanes on the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1), Formosa Freeway (Freeway No. 3) and Chiang Wei-shui Memorial Freeway (Freeway No. 5) were less than 40kph.
At 11am, the most congested road sections on Freeway No. 1 were between the 55km and 59km marks, near Taoyuan’s Jhongli District (中壢), and between the 71km and 99km marks, near northern Hsinchu, where travel speeds were about 25kph.
Photo: CNA
Traffic conditions on Freeway No. 3 were even worse, with road sections on the border between New Taipei City and Taoyuan (between the 35km and 68km marks) recording travel speeds as low as 11kph.
The heaviest traffic was on Freeway No. 5 near the Shiding (石碇) and Pinglin (坪林) onramps in New Taipei City, where traffic was moving at about 25kph.
To ease the traffic congestion, the freeway bureau has been encouraging motorists to travel during off-peak hours by lowering off-peak prices at toll stations by 30 percent between 2pm and 7pm yesterday, and between 6am and 11am on Tuesday, it said.
Real-time traffic information can be found at http://1968.freeway.gov.tw/?lang=en or through the bureau’s app, which can be downloaded at http://1968.freeway.gov.tw/app.
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