A woman whose son was killed on a crosswalk in Taipei City 11 years ago has been monitoring traffic conditions in Taiwan’s capital ever since in a one-woman attempt to improve road safety.
Chou Li-na, whose 17-year-old son was killed on a crosswalk near Xinyi Road, has turned her grief into action by patrolling the roads five days a week, recording traffic situations and reporting traffic offenses to police.
She has been working recently to organize a “Pedestrian Priority Association” to call for more mothers to help her monitor traffic safety and promote a “pedestrian first” concept in the hope that Mother’s Day can be a happier day.
“My son’s life could have been saved if I had been nosy enough to call the Taipei City Bureau of Transportation and demand that it do something about the traffic lights on the crossroads before No. 43, Section 3, Xinyi Road,” Chou said on Saturday.
Although practically every resident living near the traffic lights is aware that the time allocated for pedestrians to cross the road there is too short, no one has bothered to alert the city government to improve the situation, she said.
“Including myself, no one believed that members of their families would be unfortunate enough to be hit on the crosswalk,” she said.
“Unfortunately, my boy was hit by a bus when he was running to cross the street on a green light that was too short,” she said.
In the first year after her son’s death, Chou said, she had to rely on drugs to fall asleep and bitterly regretted that she had put off notifying the Transportation Bureau until it was too late.
She said there were too many intersections in Taipei that are poorly designed, including exclusive lanes allowing buses to travel in the opposite direction to the rest of the traffic, crossing times that are too short and traffic lights that are obscured by trees on the side of the road.
She enrolled in a course at National Taiwan University’s law school to learn more about the public’s rights, but was dealt a heavy blow when the court handed down a jail sentence of just five months for her son’s killer, who was able to pay a fine in lieu of his prison term.
This decision, which she considered a complete miscarriage of justice, depressed her to the point that she lost faith in the judicial system.
Her apathy continued until late last year, when yet another student was struck and killed on a crosswalk on nearby Renai Road.
“The utter desolation of the student’s mother re-awakened me,” she said, adding: “I told myself that we should take action to prevent similar accidents.”
Since then, she has re-appeared on the roads as an “unofficial policewoman” and is helping the student’s bereaved family fight a lawsuit, mainly seeking government compensation for the student’s death, laid squarely at the feet of substandard traffic controls.
Actress Barbie Hsu (徐熙媛) has “returned home” to Taiwan, and there are no plans to hold a funeral for the TV star who died in Japan from influenza- induced pneumonia, her family said in a statement Wednesday night. The statement was released after local media outlets reported that Barbie Hsu’s ashes were brought back Taiwan on board a private jet, which arrived at Taipei Songshan Airport around 3 p.m. on Wednesday. To the reporters waiting at the airport, the statement issued by the family read “(we) appreciate friends working in the media for waiting in the cold weather.” “She has safely returned home.
A Vietnamese migrant worker on Thursday won the NT$12 million (US$383,590) jackpot on a scratch-off lottery ticket she bought from a lottery shop in Changhua County’s Puyan Township (埔鹽), Taiwan Lottery Co said yesterday. The lottery winner, who is in her 30s and married, said she would continue to work in Taiwan and send her winnings to her family in Vietnam to improve their life. More Taiwanese and migrant workers have flocked to the lottery shop on Sec 2 of Jhangshuei Road (彰水路) to share in the luck. The shop owner, surnamed Chen (陳), said that his shop has been open for just
MUST REMAIN FREE: A Chinese takeover of Taiwan would lead to a global conflict, and if the nation blows up, the world’s factories would fall in a week, a minister said Taiwan is like Prague in 1938 facing Adolf Hitler; only if Taiwan remains free and democratic would the world be safe, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois Wu (吳志中) said in an interview with Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The ministry on Saturday said Corriere della Sera is one of Italy’s oldest and most read newspapers, frequently covers European economic and political issues, and that Wu agreed to an interview with the paper’s senior political analyst Massimo Franco in Taipei on Jan. 3. The interview was published on Jan. 26 with the title “Taiwan like Prague in 1938 with Hitler,” the ministry
Twenty-four Republican members of the US House of Representatives yesterday introduced a concurrent resolution calling on the US government to abolish the “one China” policy and restore formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Led by US representatives Tom Tiffany and Scott Perry, the resolution calls for not only re-establishing formal relations, but also urges the US Trade Representative to negotiate a free-trade agreement (FTA) with Taiwan and for US officials to advocate for Taiwan’s full membership in the UN and other international organizations. In a news release announcing the resolution, Tiffany, who represents a Wisconsin district, called the “one China” policy “outdated, counterproductive