Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) yesterday said making the YouBike public bicycle rental service free for the first 30 minutes again has always been his plan.
Chinese-language media earlier in the day reported that the Taipei City Government is planning to reinstate the policy from the beginning of next year.
The policy was implemented when the service was launched in 2012, but it was terminated by then-Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) in 2015. Since then, the first 30 minutes have cost NT$5, with rates rising by NT$10 to NT$40 for 30 minutes after that.
In response to the reports, the Taipei Department of Transportation said that the city government is planning to reinstate the policy, adding that it has not yet decided when it would be implemented.
The department said that it would take into account how many people buy the planned monthly public transportation pass covering Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan and Keelung.
Reinstating the free 30 minutes would incentivize more people to sign up for the YouBike system and reduce carbon emissions from passenger vehicles by 7,000 tonnes per year, the department said.
Taipei has 1,260 YouBike rental stations and the number of rides exceeded 34 million last year, a historic high, it said.
The department said it is working with the Department of Information Technology’s big data center to improve the distribution of bicycles, the location of new stations and increase the number of bicycles at stations with high demand.
“Making the YouBike public bicycle rental service free for the first 30 minutes has always been my policy goal,” Chiang said.
The mayor said he has asked the departments involved to draft comprehensive plans.
Chiang said that the city government would take user complaints into account, for example that some stations usually do not have bicycles at peak times while others have no free slots to return them.
STRONG RELATIONSHIPS: China would not blockade Taiwan, because President Xi respects him, and Russia would not have invaded if he were president, he said Former US president and the Republican candidate in next month’s presidential election Donald Trump said he would impose additional tariffs on China if China were to “go into Taiwan,” the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported. “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you, at 150 percent to 200 percent,” Trump was quoted as saying in an interview with the WSJ published on Friday. Asked if he would use military force against a blockade on Taiwan by China, Trump said it would not come to that because Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) respected
The Taipei Department of Transportation discouraged YouBike 2.0E users from taking them on long-distance trips after a Taipei city councilor said that riders often use the new electric bike, YouBike 2.0E, to climb Yangmingshan (陽明山). Taipei earlier this year began offering the first 30 minutes of YouBike 2.0 rentals for free, with Taipei and New Taipei offering the YouBike 2.0E on Aug. 30 to encourage rider usage. For YouBike 2.0, the rate is NT$10 per 30 minutes within the first four hours, NT$20 per 30 minutes for five to eight hours and NT$40 per 30 minutes after eight hours. Meanwhile, for e-bikes,
RESOURCE RICH: Taiwan is located in the Pacific Ring of Fire and has up to 30 gigawatts of the potential energy, of which 10 gigawatts could be economically viable Academia Sinica and CPC Corp yesterday began drilling the nation’s first deep geothermal well in Yilan County’s Yuanshan Township (員山). The 4km-deep well is expected to take 18 months to complete and has an estimated investment of NT$337 million (US$10.54 million), Academia Sinica President James Liao (廖俊智) said. “While Taiwan has up to 30 gigawatts of potential deep geothermal energy, with an estimated 10 gigawatts being economically viable, only by digging wells can we determine the actual amount of commercially viable geothermal energy,” Liao said at the project’s opening ceremony. Data collected during and after the excavation process would be used for future
HACKERS’ MARKET: Chat logs about Taiwan and documents outlining ways to take over online accounts were leaked from a company that sells data from hacks Taiwanese cybersecurity specialists found 577 leaked documents which show that the Chinese Communist Party is engaging in “cognitive warfare” against Taiwan through cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns, a documentary released last month by Japanese public broadcaster NHK showed. The filmmakers behind Tracking China’s Leaked Documents said they spent six months visiting seven countries, including Taiwan, where they interviewed members of TeamT5, a malware research and cybersecurity firm, which found the leaked documents. TeamT5 said they discovered a string of mysterious URLs on the social media platform X, which they suspected could be accounts created by hackers or people who leaked data, which led