Smooth passenger traffic was mostly observed yesterday on the first working day of the TPass monthly transit card program and Minister of Transportation and Communications Wang Kwo-tsai (王國材) said that he hoped that all turnstiles at stations would be able to scan the new cards by the end of the year.
As the program was only finalized in March, the companies only had three months to upgrade the turnstiles and TPass card users have to go through designated gates at Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) stations, the Taoyuan International Airport MRT Line and the Taichung MRT, Wang said.
The Taipei and Kaohsiung MRT systems had previous experience operating contactless turnstiles for their respective monthly passes, so all their turnstiles are accessible for TPass card users, he said.
Photo: Tu Chien-jung, Taipei Times
The new regional public transport card had been used for an estimated 414,000 journeys since it was launched on Saturday in northern, central and southern Taiwan, Wang said, adding that about 307,000 TPass cards had been sold so far in the three regions.
The TPass issued in Taipei can be used for travel in three other cities in northern Taiwan — Keelung, New Taipei City and Taoyuan — while the other versions cover Taichung and Miaoli, Nantou and Changhua counties in central Taiwan; and Tainan, Kaohsiung and Pingtung County in the south.
In Taichung, use of the TPass also was progressing smoothly yesterday, said the Taichung Transportation Bureau, which reported sales of 17,000 cards since presales began on June 15.
Commuter traffic was also flowing well at the TRA stations in Kaohsiung, although a few people had forgotten to activate their TPass cards and could not get though the turnstiles.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday used a TPass card to travel on the MRT from Taipei to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport.
She said that transportation is an important part of life, as many people have to commute to work, and she hoped the new monthly pass would help ease the financial burden.
Tsai also encouraged more people to take public transportation to reduce carbon emissions for the sake of the environment.
The central government has allocated NT$20 billion (US$642.4 million) over the next three years to subsidize projects for the implementation of regional monthly transit passes across Taiwan, Wang said.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS