State-owned Taiwan Railway Corp (TRC) reported yesterday that average daily passenger volume increased about 1.4 percent from a year earlier during the period of June to this month, despite raising ticket prices in June.
In a statement, the company said the number of average daily passengers from June 23 to Dec. 19 was 652,000, up about 10,000 riders,
or 1.4 percent, from a year earlier, while daily ticket revenue rose NT$14.11 million (US$448,577), or 28 percent, to NT$64.44 million during the same period.
Photo: Cheng Wei-chi, Taipei Tim
TRC introduced a 26.8 percent fare hike on June 23 for the first time in 30 years in a bid to reduce its operating deficit.
Following the fare hike and passenger volume increase, sales for this year would increase by NT$2.6 billion from a year earlier, with average daily passenger volume predicted to rise 2.9 percent to almost 670,000, the company said.
TRC said it has kept working with the government to promote the regional TPass program, and average daily passenger volume under TPass rose 26.3 percent from a year earlier to 185,000 from Jan. 1 to Dec. 19.
Since its reorganization from the Taiwan Railways Administration, a government agency, into a corporation in January last year, the state-owned company said, it has intensified efforts to boost its brand value and partnered with the tourism industry to provide a wide range of railway tour packages.
In the first 11 months of this year, TRC said its railway tourism operations generated about NT$100 million in revenue, up 15.12 percent from a year earlier, with sales this year expected to pass NT$120 million.
The company said that it has continued to improve safety, as well as its on-time rate and convenience for passengers.
During the January to October period, TRC’s on-time rate reached 94.24 percent. The rating continued to improve, hitting 97.5 percent last month, a target set by the company.
From January to last month, there were two major accidents, down from four a year earlier, while general accidents fell by three to 38 with the number of driving irregularities down by 88 to 759, it said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS