The Mass Rapid Transit system’s (MRT) Neihu and Muzha lines were completely suspended following a system failure last Friday. This incident has highlighted not only a problem with the MRT system, but more importantly, the fact that the government’s decisions on infrastructure investment are often unwise and have an adverse impact on the nation.
The source of the MRT malfunction is the problematic system integration of the Muzha Line and the newly opened Neihu Line — the first MRT system in the world that combines two different operating systems. The two lines were completed 13 years apart. Theoretically speaking, this case required a “smart settlement.”
A so-called smart settlement must be built on an effective understanding of the direction in which a situation is changing and of future requirements. It must be market-oriented rather than manufacturing-oriented. In a rapid, diverse and changing knowledge-based economy, such a concept is especially important.
The system integration of the Muzha and Neihu lines is an example of an unwise decision by the Taipei City Government. The experience in advanced countries shows that similar cases have been settled by replacing the old system with a new one. Taipei, however, did the exact opposite. That was because the city’s decision-makers are stuck in a manufacturing-oriented mindset. Moreover, to keep costs at a minimum and because of a limited budget, they chose to integrate new and old systems.
The government should have made the decision based on the direction of district development in Taipei and the growth of future market demand. The resident and mobile population of Neihu District is double that of Muzha. In addition, the Neihu Technology Park, the Nangang Software Park and the Nangang Exhibition Hall combined will attract more people than the Maokong Gondola and Taipei City Zoo. Thus the Neihu Line should have been a high-capacity system. Instead, Taipei chose to accommodate the medium-capacity system of the Muzha Line.
In the long run, the Muzha and Neihu lines will connect to the Banqiao/Nangang (blue) Line, the Xinyi/Tamsui (red) Line, the Songshan/Xindian (green) Line and the proposed Minsheng-Xizhi Line. When these lines are completed, the Neihu Line will have to deal with even higher passenger volume.
The malfunction of the Muzha and Neihu lines serves as a warning for what is to come. It mirrors the fact that many of the government’s infrastructure projects suffer from a frugality and willingness to cut corners that belong to a past era fraught with economic problems, as well as short-term populist thinking and booty-sharing. The unwise decisions these attitudes lead to are everywhere to be seen, and the catastrophic costs that will result from these decisions will haunt us forever.
Bert Lim is president of the World Economic Society.
TRANSLATED BY TED YANG
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS