Taoyuan expects to add 100 YouBike stations in the municipality by the end of this year as part of a long-term expansion of the bike rental system, Taoyuan Department of Transportation Director-general Chang Hsin-fu (張新福) said on Thursday.
That would bring the number of YouBike stations in Taoyuan to 517, Chang said at an administrative meeting during which he reported on the planning of additional YouBike stations and the phasing out of the YouBike 1.0 system.
In addition to adding another 100 stations by the end of this year, Taoyuan wants its YouBike network to have 750 stations by the end of 2028, Chang said.
Photo: Lee Jung-ping, Taipei Times
Taoyuan currently has 10,645 YouBikes, and there is a system in place at busy stations during peak hours where workers are on hand to replace bikes and free up parking slots, he said.
At the meeting, Taoyuan Mayor Simon Chang (張善政) asked the department and the city’s Department of Tourism to work together to enhance YouBike coverage at the city’s tourist hotspots while phasing out the YouBike 1.0 system by October.
The YouBike 2.0 system has a solar-powered control panel mounted on each bicycle, which could be used by scanning a QR code, and each dock would accommodate one bicycle instead of two.
The YouBike 1.0 system required users to rent the bike through a kiosk near the parking dock, or by swiping an Easycard over the sensor zone at the dock, and the docks accommodated two bicycles rather than one, a less energy-efficient arrangement, the system’s manufacturer said.
The locking system has also changed. Renters of 1.0 bikes have to keep the key when temporarily parking the bike on the side of the road, while for 2.0 bike users, the experience is keyless.
The new 2.0 system allows users to lock and unlock the bikes with an attached cylindrical key that users gain access to with an Easycard or by scanning the QR code on the control panel.
These changes seem to be boosting usage, Chang Hsin-fu said. YouBike 2.0 bicycles that are already in service are being used about five to six times every day, compared with two to 2.5 times a day for YouBike 1.0 vehicles.
The electric-assisted YouBike 2.0E, launched on Feb. 1 in Taoyuan, has the highest daily usage of all three types of bikes at seven to 10 times, he said.
The Taoyuan Department of Transportation said it started transiting from the 1.0 to the 2.0 version in November last year.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching