Land expropriation disputes in Kaohsiung’s Fengshan District (鳳山) might thwart a government plan to complete the city’s underground railway system in December next year, the Railway Reconstruction Bureau said.
The bureau on Tuesday last week said that difficulties encountered in buying private land in Fengshan had delayed progress by more than a year, jeopardizing the railway’s scheduled completion.
Some Fengshan residents, unhappy with prices the government has offered to buy their land, have refused to sell their property at the proposed price.
Photo: Wang Jung-hsiang, Taipei Times
The bureau is bargaining with landowners with the mediation of Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Hsu Chih-chieh (許智傑) and has obtained the right to use most of the land in the district that is needed, it said.
The scheduled completion date could still be achieved if a deal with Fengshan landowners is reached in the next two months, as the remaining administrative and engineering activities could be accelerated, the bureau said, adding that it is to continue to aim to meet the December next year deadline.
Hsu said he is doing everything he can to assist the bureau and that he believes trains would be running by the end of next year.
The underground rail program is too important for Kaohsiung’s transportation system for it to be delayed, he said.
However, a local source with insight into the project said that, by even a “conservative estimate,” delays in Fengshan mean the underground railway is unlikely to be completed until March 2019, while completion of above-ground facilities are likely to be delayed until 2023.
The Kaohsiung underground railway was projected is to run 15.37km from Zuoying District (左營) to Fengshan District along the north-south axis.
The project is divided into three sections — Zuoying, Kaohsiung and Fengshan — with an estimated total budget of NT$999 million (US$30.18 million).
The Fengshan leg, where a row over land prices occurred, is the last section of the program to have its budget approved, the last section on which work began and has the slowest rate of progress, with less than 50 percent of the construction stated as complete as of January.
An engineering and construction worker said on condition of anonymity that while reaching operational status by next year is a “highly challenging” goal, estimates that put project completion at 2019 or later are too pessimistic.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS