Freeway Bureau officials are to meet with transportation experts today to discuss possible methods to ease congestion on the Chiang Wei-shui Memorial Freeway (Freeway No. 5) amid a domestic tourism boom.
Traffic congestion frequently occurs on weekends and holidays along the freeway connecting Taipei and Yilan, and the road cannot be widened.
To ease the congestion, the bureau has implemented a high-occupancy vehicle control policy on northbound lanes every Sunday.
However, drivers on the freeway experienced possibly the worst traffic congestion during this year’s four-day Dragon Boat Festival long weekend — the first long weekend after the government relaxed COVID-19 disease prevention measures. The average speed on the southbound lanes of the Hsuehshan Tunnel were below 40kph for more than 30 consecutive hours.
The bureau has entrusted experts from the Chinese Institute of Transportation with the task of studying measures that could be implemented to facilitate transportation during major national holidays and long weekends. The congestion on Freeway No. 5 is one of the issues the experts have tackled.
The bureau said that it had used almost every means possible to regulate traffic on Freeway No. 5 over the Dragon Boat Festival holiday, but the number of vehicles accessing the freeway still exceeded its capacity.
It hopes that the experts will come up with more effective solutions, the bureau added.
Some experts previously suggested that the bureau use vehicle license numbers to regulate access to the freeway during holidays. For example, those with odd license numbers could enter the freeway in the morning and those with even numbers could enter in the afternoon, it said.
However, the bureau said that its assessment found that the measure would only have a minimal effect.
With traffic on the freeway deteriorating because of the booming domestic travel market, the measure is even less feasible, as it would result in traffic being more congested in the morning and the afternoon, the bureau said, adding that drivers heading to the east coast might want to leave early in the morning rather than in the afternoon.
In 2014, the bureau tried to follow experts’ suggestion of having drivers pay 50 percent more in toll fees if they accessed Freeway No. 5 during peak hours and 50 percent less if they accessed the freeway during off-peak hours. The measure only caused the peak-hour traffic volume to drop by 3.2 percent.
Regulations governing freeway toll fees have capped the maximum toll charge at no more than twice the current fee, the bureau said.
If a congestion pricing scheme were implemented, people driving from Taipei to Yilan’s Suao Township (蘇澳) could be charged no more than NT$79 in one-way toll fees, which many find affordable, it said.
Stricter ramp meter controls could cause congestion on local roads, which local government officials often complain about, the bureau added.
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