Public transport failures
The removal and reconstruction of the Gongguan roundabout in Taipei’s Zhongzheng District (中正), originally scheduled to take 65 days as proposed by the design team and approved by city officials, was shortened to just 17 days and officially completed on Monday.
While Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an’s (蔣萬安) administration has been publicizing this achievement, it fails to recognize that completing the project in just one-quarter of the originally planned time highlights major miscalculations in the original design and approval process. That not only misled the public, but also suggests that the extended construction period might have been used to inflate the project’s budget. The city officials who approved the original plan should feel ashamed.
If the designer’s misjudgment of the construction period led to an inflated budget — with the city government paying the full contract amount even though the work was finished in just one-quarter of the estimated time — the city government would have incurred losses from being overcharged.
According to Article 63 of the Government Procurement Act (政府採購法), such contracts must stipulate “the responsibility of one party in the event that erroneous execution, falsity or poor management has caused damages to the other party.” Thus, the city government should hold the designer accountable for any design errors and seek compensation for the resulting losses.
Just one day after the completion of the roundabout’s removal, the intersection saw severe traffic congestion during morning rush hour. Routes leading into the city from Taipei’s Wenshan (文山) and Xindian (新店) districts via Roosevelt Road were completely jammed. Xinglong Road (興隆路) and Xinhai Road (辛亥路) were also affected. The resulting public outcry made it clear that the original planning and design were flawed. Chiang and the other city officials responsible should come forward and apologize, and those accountable should step down or face disciplinary action.
The Taipei City Government should also hold the contracted planning and design firm accountable for any errors in accordance with the aforementioned laws, including seeking compensation.
The Chiang administration refused to listen to the public. Removing the Gongguan roundabout and filling in the bus-only underpass was as absurd as proposing to demolish the Keelung Road underpass in front of City Hall. The project is undoubtedly the main reason why traffic has suddenly become so congested. It is too late to undue the damage, but how would city officials explain themselves to the many people now affected?
The government must urgently work to find a solution, for instance by constructing a new road to connect Wenshan District with the city center.
Su Chiang-hai
Taipei
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS