The grand opening of the Taipei City Hall Bus Station will be delayed until next month, the Taipei City Government said, acknowledging that traffic would pose a challenges in the area after the station opens.
The bus station, located at the intersection of Zhongxiao E Road and Keelung Road, was initially scheduled to begin operating last month, a plan that was pushed back to this month before being delayed again.
Taipei City Department of Transportation Commissioner Lo Shiaw-shyan (羅孝賢) said the department and the operator, Uni-president Development Corp, were finalizing the details of the building and the bus routes, seeking to minimize the impact on area traffic when the bus station opens.
The intersection is one of the busiest in Taipei City.
The bus station is now scheduled to begin operations on Aug. 5. It will serve as a transportation hub for 14 bus companies, with services to Taoyuan, Hsinchu and Yilan.
The planning of the bus station dates back to when President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was Taipei mayor 12 years ago. The city planned to build four major bus terminals in the city. The Taipei Bus Station on Chengde Road and Huayin Street was launched last year.
Two more bus terminals will be situated in the Muzha and Yuanshan areas.
While the city government said it was confident it would open the station on schedule, it said it was facing problems similar to those encountered when the Taipei Bus Station was opened, including heavy congestion in the area and concerns about operators making excess profits.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Chen Yu-mei (陳玉梅) said the new bus station in Xinyi District also has a small terminal and waiting area. The station takes up about 2,400 ping (7,934m²) of the 43,000 ping building. The 31-story building also features a shopping mall, restaurants and a hotel, which are scheduled to open in October.
“The bus station occupies only 5.7 percent of the entire building, making it just a facility of the hotel and shopping mall. Controlling traffic and crowds in the area will be a great challenge for the station operators,” she said.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift