Public housing development in Taipei has fallen far behind schedule, while the planning and construction of bicycle routes are unlikely to be finished in two to three years, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said on Sunday in Amsterdam.
A Taipei City Government delegation led by Ko arrived on Saturday in the Netherlands’ capital and on Sunday attended a presentation on urban renewal and social housing by urban design specialists Jeroen van der Veer and Maurits de Hoog, advisers to the Amsterdam Federation of Housing Associations.
After the presentation, Ko said he was particularly impressed that social housing makes up about 30 percent of the Netherlands’ total housing and about 50 percent of Amsterdam’s, compared with only 0.1 percent and 0.68 percent of housing in Taiwan and Taipei respectively.
“Taiwan’s social housing policy continues to lag far behind,” he said, adding that as the issue has yet to be solved at the basic structural level, it is not surprising that rental and real-estate prices in Taiwan remain so high.
While his goal is to increase Taipei’s public housing to about 5 percent, it would be very difficult to accomplish this even in eight years, he added.
The delegation also met with Representative to the Netherlands Tom Chou (周台竹) and visited Utrecht, where Mayor Jan van Zanen invited them to a professional soccer match between Utrecht and Ajax.
Before attending an evening banquet hosted by Chou, Ko said that Taipei is planning to expand the Taipei Fine Arts Museum by constructing a second hall.
A budget of approximately NT$5.4 billion (US$185.2 million) is likely to be allocated next year, he told reporters.
Asked about issuing a national museum card like the one that offers unlimited free access to almost all museums in the Netherlands for a month, Ko said tickets to museums in Taipei are already very cheap, so issuing a similar card might not be as effective.
However, there are plans to issue a card to allow elderly residents to visit Taipei museums for free, he said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,