Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) yesterday outlined plans for “smart and green” city development, announcing that bike paths will be laid alongside all of the capital’s major arteries.
In a speech at the Green Together City-to-City Sustainability Dialogues also attended by Taichung Mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) and Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), Ko outlined his vision for a “green city” characterized by zero growth in electricity consumption and usage of public transportation by 80 percent of city residents.
Ko outlined policies aimed at increasing use of public transportation, saying that new bicycle paths would be laid alongside all city roads 40m wide or more.
“Presently, we have bicycles, but we don’t have bicycle lanes,” Ko said, referring to the rapid growth of the city’s YouBike service.
Taipei Department of Transportation Commissioner Chung Hui-yu (鍾慧諭) said the city has budgeted NT$1.2 billion (US$38 million) this year for bicycle path construction costs. City plans call for quadrupling the length of city bicycle paths to 209km by 2019.
Ko also announced that the city was considering introducing a car-sharing program, as well as reforms to more closely integrate the city’s bus lines with the MRT, update bus computer systems and enable fees for bus rides to be charged based on distance.
He said the city also plans to promote green architecture and use special water-porous pavement to reduce Taipei’s urban heat-island effect.
In addition to “green” policies, Ko also announced policies for “smart” technological reform, highlighted by changes to the city’s free WiFi service.
“With more than 6,400 hot spots, Taipei Free consumes between NT$10 million and NT$20 million every year, but even I myself have trouble using the service,” Ko said.
He said that in the future, the city would merge Taipei Free into the national ITaiwan service, dropping the number of hotspots to less than 2,000, while integrating additional private hotspots operated by businesses, such as Starbucks and 711.
A small number of Taiwanese this year lost their citizenship rights after traveling in China and obtaining a one-time Chinese passport to cross the border into Russia, a source said today. The people signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of neighboring Russia with companies claiming they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, the source said on condition of anonymity. The travelers were actually issued one-time-use Chinese passports, they said. Taiwanese are prohibited from holding a Chinese passport or household registration. If found to have a Chinese ID, they may lose their resident status under Article 9-1
Taiwanese were praised for their composure after a video filmed by Taiwanese tourists capturing the moment a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Japan’s Aomori Prefecture went viral on social media. The video shows a hotel room shaking violently amid Monday’s quake, with objects falling to the ground. Two Taiwanese began filming with their mobile phones, while two others held the sides of a TV to prevent it from falling. When the shaking stopped, the pair calmly took down the TV and laid it flat on a tatami mat, the video shows. The video also captured the group talking about the safety of their companions bathing
PROBLEMATIC APP: Citing more than 1,000 fraud cases, the government is taking the app down for a year, but opposition voices are calling it censorship Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday decried a government plan to suspend access to Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu (小紅書) for one year as censorship, while the Presidential Office backed the plan. The Ministry of the Interior on Thursday cited security risks and accusations that the Instagram-like app, known as Rednote in English, had figured in more than 1,700 fraud cases since last year. The company, which has about 3 million users in Taiwan, has not yet responded to requests for comment. “Many people online are already asking ‘How to climb over the firewall to access Xiaohongshu,’” Cheng posted on
A classified Pentagon-produced, multiyear assessment — the Overmatch brief — highlighted unreported Chinese capabilities to destroy US military assets and identified US supply chain choke points, painting a disturbing picture of waning US military might, a New York Times editorial published on Monday said. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s comments in November last year that “we lose every time” in Pentagon-conducted war games pitting the US against China further highlighted the uncertainty about the US’ capability to intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. “It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically
RSS