A plan to provide English translation in taxis was announced yesterday by the Taipei City Government, among other plans to benefit the city’s cab drivers.
“[In the future,] a taxi driver will be able to connect to our English translation center with the push of a button, enabling drivers and riders to directly communicate with the center,” Taipei Department of Transportation Commissioner Chung Hui-yu (鍾慧諭) said.
While presently, drivers or passengers can call the city’s 1999 citizen hotline for English translation service, many cabbies and passengers remain unaware of the service, Taipei Public Transportation Office Assistant Director Lin Li-chu (林麗珠) said.
Photo: CNA
She said that the goal of the new “direct line” button would be to ensure that foreigners would automatically be provided with interpretation while taking a taxi, aiding tourists or first-time visitors unfamiliar with services provided by the city.
Chung added that the direct connection with the interpretation center will come as part of broader plans to upgrade the fare machines used in city taxis.
The new fare machines will also feature functions such as GPS and automatically printed receipts, she said. The timeline of the roll-out would depend on how quickly the Ministry of Transportation approves a specific machine model, she said.
Meanwhile, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) announced a broader vision of reform to the city’s taxi service, which he referred to as “one ring” of public transportation provided by the city government.
“We hope to gradually move the system in the direction of getting into taxis at fixed points, using the Internet to hail cabs instead of randomly calling them from the curbside,” Ko said.
He said that while it was impractical to immediately forbid drivers from picking up roadside passengers, drivers could gradually be channeled into fixed pickup locations.
“In Taipei, there are often many empty taxicabs on the streets because drivers have no place to rest, wasting gas and increasing the burden on our transportation,” Ko said. “If every taxicab driver finds that there are fixed points where it is convenient to park without seeing a drop in the number of passengers they carry, they will not continue to roam the streets when not carrying passengers.”
Taipei’s Public Transportation Office announced that 13 new fixed pickup locations would be added near MRT stations, bringing the city’s total to 213. In addition, the city will also double to an hour the time cabbies can park for free at public parking lots, while dropping earlier requirements that drivers present four forms of documentation to use the service.
Taipei Taxicab and Bus Business Association president Wang Ming-hsiung (王明雄) said providing free parking was important because the city has only a handful of small rest stations for taxi drivers.
The reforms to the free parking service are important to ensure drivers could take advantage of the service, he said.
“Few drivers took advantage of the previous half-hour free parking because it was not enough time,” Wang said. “After you got in and went to the restroom, the half-hour was gone, while you were forced to go through a set of complicated procedures to enjoy the service.”
He urged the city to further lengthen the free parking allowance to two hours to allow drivers to take a short nap.
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