The Freeway Bureau has finished a feasibility study for extending the freeway overpass connecting New Taipei City’s Wugu District (五股) and Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) to Miaoli County.
The feasibility study for constructing an overpass from Yangmei to Miaoli took three years to complete, the agency said yesterday, adding that the Ministry of Transportation and Communications would choose the route that would be used to construct the extension.
The report is being reviewed by the ministry, which would hear opinions from agencies to sort out remaining issues, including where the freeway and the overpass could be connected, if the freeway section in Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口) should be straightened and how the construction would bypass a geologically fragile zone.
The extension of the overpass, which is alongside the National Sun Yat-sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1), was proposed by local councilors in 2015 to ease traffic congestion that frequently occurs between Yangmei and Hsinchu during rush hour, as well as on long weekends and major national holidays, the agency said, adding that congestion occurred due to the merger of traffic by local drivers in Hsinchu and those driving past the freeway section in Hsinchu.
If the overpass extension was built from Yangmei to Toufen City (頭份) in Miaoli, an estimated 30 percent of traffic from Freeway No. 1 between Yangmei and Hsinchu could be diverted to the overpass, the bureau said.
The study showed that the proposed overpass extension from Yangmei to Miaoli would be about 39km long, with the estimated construction cost reaching NT$75 billion (US$2.46 billion), and the self-liquidation ratio of the project would be 7.73 percent.
It would take about six years to complete the project, including the time needed to obtain land, the agency said.
The bureau does not propose building additional interchanges between Yangmei and Toufen, it said, adding that it would have to study ways for it to quickly respond to emergencies in that section.
For the extension, the section between Yangmei and Hukou would on the embankment, it said, adding the section between Hukou and Hsinchu would be an overpass.
The section between Hsinchu and Toufen would be constructed by expanding the lanes on Freeway No. 1, it said.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS