Fatalities from scooter accidents in Taipei City have increased every year despite tightened traffic rules, the Traffic Police Division said yesterday, vowing to strengthen measures to address the problem.
Statistics from the division showed that more than 50 percent of road fatalities in the city over the past three years involved scooter drivers, with the number of deaths caused by scooter accidents increasing every year.
“Scooters are the most dangerous type of transportation, and we have been trying to reduce the number of traffic accidents involving scooters. We will target scooter drivers and clamp down on traffic violations,” division chief Fang Yang-ning (方仰寧) said.
VIOLATIONS
Major traffic violations by scooter drivers — including drunk driving, running red lights and driving in car-only lanes — will top the crackdown list, he said.
Democratic Progressive Party Taipei City councilors Chien Yu-yen (簡余晏) and Lee Ching-feng (李慶鋒), however, accused the city government of handing out too many tickets to scooter drivers and treating them as “cash dispensers.”
A list of roads provided by the councilors showed that scooter riders were most likely to be ticketed on Civic Boulevard Sec 3, where police issued 8,836 tickets to scooter riders between January and last month, followed by Chengde Road Sec 2 and Zhongzheng Road.
Most of the tickets were issued for speeding violations or driving in car-only lanes, the division said.
IMPROVEMENTS
“The city government should put more effort into improving the traffic situation around those roads, rather than just writing tickets to scooter drivers and taking money from them,” Chien said.
Lee also challenged the bonus system, which rewards traffic cops according to the number of tickets they issue.
Lee said the city should focus more on road inspections and improving the design of traffic signs and lanes.
The division said it had given more warnings to drivers, adding that the number of tickets issued to scooter drivers had dropped from 650,000 last year to 470,000 this year.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm early yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, less than a week after a typhoon barreled across the nation. The agency issued an advisory at 3:30am stating that the 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, of the Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point, with a 100km radius. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA
Residents have called on the Taipei City Government to reconsider its plan to demolish a four-decades-old pedestrian overpass near Daan Forest Park. The 42-year-old concrete and steel structure that serves as an elevated walkway over the intersection of Heping and Xinsheng roads is to be closed on Tuesday in preparation for demolition slated for completion by the end of the month. However, in recent days some local residents have been protesting the planned destruction of the intersection overpass that is rendered more poetically as “sky bridge” in Chinese. “This bridge carries the community’s collective memory,” said a man surnamed Chuang
FATALITIES: The storm claimed at least two lives — a female passenger in a truck that was struck by a falling tree and a man who was hit by a utility pole Workers cleared fallen trees and shop owners swept up debris yesterday after one of the biggest typhoons to hit the nation in decades claimed at least two lives. Typhoon Kong-rey was packing winds of 184kph when it slammed into eastern Taiwan on Thursday, uprooting trees, triggering floods and landslides, and knocking out power as it swept across the nation. A 56-year-old female foreign national died from her injuries after the small truck she was in was struck by a falling tree on Provincial Highway 14A early on Thursday. The second death was reported at 8pm in Taipei on Thursday after a 48-year-old man
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm earlier today, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The 22nd tropical storm, named Yinxing, in this year's Pacific typhoon season formed at 2am, the CWA said. As of 8am, the storm was 1,730km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻) with a 100km radius, it said. It was moving west-northwest at 32kph, with maximum sustained winds of 83kph and gusts of up to 108kph. Based on its current path, the storm is not expected to hit Taiwan, CWA meteorologist Huang En-hung (黃恩宏) said. However, a more accurate forecast would be made on Wednesday, when Yinxing is
RSS