The Taiwan Area National Freeway Bureau (TANFB,
TANFB's Traffic Management Section Chief Chi Wen-chung (
"From midnight to 4pm on Sunday, 890,000 vehicles traveled on the Sun Yat-sen Freeway and it was normal traffic volume for a holiday like this," Chi said.
High traffic volume on the northbound lanes of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway began by 3pm yesterday near the Houli Toll Station (后里收費站). Average speeds near the station fell to between 30kph and 40kph until around 5pm.
An accident involving three cars occurred at the 207km mark of the northbound lanes near the Houli Toll Station at 2:37pm. A passenger was injured and sent to the hospital but a highway patrol officer told the Taipei Times that it was only a minor injury.
Asked why the heaviest traffic was always in the Taichung area, Chi said that the central part of the freeway is actually a bottleneck for traffic flow.
"In northern Taiwan, other than the Sun Yat-sen Freeway, we also have the Northern Second Freeway (北二高). In the south, we have the Southern Second Freeway (南二高). But in the central area, we only have the Sun Yat-sen Freeway with two lanes northbound and another two southbound to absorb all the traffic from the north and the south. That's the main reason for the constant congestion in this area," he said.
The most serious congestion yesterday was on the southbound lanes near the second Kaohsiung exit where traffic moved at about 19kph at 3:30pm. Also in the southbound lanes, heavy traffic was seen in the section from Padu (
In Tashi (
For air traffic, the Kinmen Shangyi Airport (
As of press time, domestic airlines did not plan to have extra flights for passengers and most tickets for Sunday and Monday were sold out.
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