The Taipei Dome project should plan for an initial maximum capacity of 59,833 people if construction is to continue, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said on Wednesday.
Ko made the remarks in response to questions from audience members after a speech at the Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce Taiwan in Taipei.
The Taipei City Government ordered Farglory Land Development Co to halt construction of the Taipei Dome in May 2015, citing safety concerns and unauthorized changes to the blueprints, which it said constitute breaches of the Building Act (建築法).
Photo: Yang Hsin-hui, Taipei Times
Asked why the city government could not solve the problems surrounding the stalled project, Ko said the main problem is in the design of evacuation routes.
As the Taipei Dome is directly opposite Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on Zhongxiao E Road, Sec 4 — where zoning limits building height to 60m — the plans are to have the main baseball field 10.5m below street level, making evacuation routes difficult to design.
“If possible, the dome should be allowed to operate with a maximum capacity of about 60,000 people at first, with a decision to be made later over how that can be increased,” Ko said.
“The current design is really strange, but there should be a way to overcome it,” he added.
Another possible solution would be to convert a section designated for a shopping mall to business and office use, which would significantly lower the number of people in the area and possibly reduce evacuation difficulties, he said.
At the Taipei City Council on Thursday, New Power Party Taipei City Councilor Sabrina Lim (林亮君) asked Ko what he meant by “letting it operate first.”
The city government suggests reducing the proposed maximum capacity of the Taipei Dome to 59,833 people, which is the number approved by an environmental impact assessment (EIA) review so the design would more likely pass the city’s urban design review, Ko said.
Taipei Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Liou Ming-lone (劉銘龍) said that the EIA review approved a recommended maximum capacity of 59,833, so if Farglory wants to increase capacity, it would have to propose another EIA review.
“Continued stalling is not a solution,” Ko said, adding that if Farglory insists on a greater capacity, reviews would take much longer.
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