More than 100 taxis, tour buses and trucks are to surround the Ministry of Transportation and Communications tomorrow to protest tougher penalties for automobile drivers.
The penalties, which took effect in June, were designed to penalize drivers who disregard the right of way for pedestrians, including a two-month driver’s license suspension if a driver accumulates 12 penalty points in one year.
A driver’s license would be revoked if the license is suspended twice in two years and if the driver accumulates additional points. Since the new penalties took effect in June, taxi drivers are often handed a NT$600 fine and one point for illegal parking, National Drivers’ Alliance Chairman Liu Hung-chang (劉鴻樟) said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“If a taxi driver’s license was suspended for two months after having accumulated 12 penalty points, it means they cannot work for two months, and they might not have other means to support themselves,” Liu said.
“Taxi drivers do not deliberately contravene traffic laws. Breaches of traffic regulations happen frequently because roads are ill-designed, having too many parking spaces for scooters and cars on the roadside,” he added.
There is also a lack of temporary parking zones in road sections where roadside parking is not available, Liu said, adding that taxi drivers are forced to break rules whenever a passenger hails a cab. Taxi drivers are frequently caught contravening traffic laws because some people make a living by using dashboard cameras to record contraventions and submit the evidence to collect cash prizes, he said.
“If a taxi driver can earn NT$3,000 per day, they would not have much left over if they were given two tickets that day for illegal parking,” he said, adding that the same problem has occurred with truck drivers as well. The ministry was passing the buck to local governments when the alliance told the ministry about the problem, Liu said.
“When we expressed our grievances to local government officials and hoped that they would reconfigure where red lines and yellow lines are drawn, we were vaguely told that yellow lines would be drawn as much as possible,” Liu said.
In Taiwan, parking or waiting is not allowed along red curbside lines, while five-minute waiting is allowed next to yellow curbs. The alliance specifically demanded that 10m to 12m-long yellow lines be drawn for every 150m of red lines, so motor vehicles could safely load and unload passengers and goods, Liu said.
Yellow lines should be drawn every 10m to 20m at every intersection, he said.
The ministry said it is working with local governments to create 456 temporary parking zones for car drivers.
The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) and Chunghwa Telecom yesterday confirmed that an international undersea cable near Keelung Harbor had been cut by a Chinese ship, the Shunxin-39, a freighter registered in Cameroon. Chunghwa Telecom said the cable had its own backup equipment, and the incident would not affect telecommunications within Taiwan. The CGA said it dispatched a ship under its first fleet after receiving word of the incident and located the Shunxin-39 7 nautical miles (13km) north of Yehliu (野柳) at about 4:40pm on Friday. The CGA demanded that the Shunxin-39 return to seas closer to Keelung Harbor for investigation over the
An apartment building in New Taipei City’s Sanchong District (三重) collapsed last night after a nearby construction project earlier in the day allegedly caused it to tilt. Shortly after work began at 9am on an ongoing excavation of a construction site on Liuzhang Street (六張街), two neighboring apartment buildings tilted and cracked, leading to exterior tiles peeling off, city officials said. The fire department then dispatched personnel to help evacuate 22 residents from nine households. After the incident, the city government first filled the building at No. 190, which appeared to be more badly affected, with water to stabilize the
DEEPER REVIEW: After receiving 19 hospital reports of suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health applied for an epidemiological investigation A buffet restaurant in Taipei’s Xinyi District (信義) is to be fined NT$3 million (US$91,233) after it remained opened despite an order to suspend operations following reports that 32 people had been treated for suspected food poisoning, the Taipei Department of Health said yesterday. The health department said it on Tuesday received reports from hospitals of people who had suspected food poisoning symptoms, including nausea, vomiting, stomach pain and diarrhea, after they ate at an INPARADISE (饗饗) branch in Breeze Xinyi on Sunday and Monday. As more than six people who ate at the restaurant sought medical treatment, the department ordered the
Taiwan plans to cull as many as 120,000 invasive green iguanas this year to curb the species’ impact on local farmers, the Ministry of Agriculture said. Chiu Kuo-hao (邱國皓), a section chief in the ministry’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency, on Sunday said that green iguanas have been recorded across southern Taiwan and as far north as Taichung. Although there is no reliable data on the species’ total population in the country, it has been estimated to be about 200,000, he said. Chiu said about 70,000 iguanas were culled last year, including about 45,000 in Pingtung County, 12,000 in Tainan, 9,900 in
RSS