Taipei’s YouBike public bicycle rental scheme has seen a sharp increase in its usage rate, but its popularity has meant insufficient bicycles or bicycle racks at some spots.
At popular locations, like the ones next to the Gongguan and Guting MRT stations, users can find it difficult to find an empty rack to return their bicycle and have to wait in line for a space.
At the Taipei City Hall stop and World Trade Center stop, where many users rent bicycles for commuting, the racks are often empty after work, with no bicycles left.
A Taipei resident who filed a complaint to the Taipei mayor’s mailbox, an online platform for residents to share their concerns about city policies and developments, said he could not find a parking space at Wuchang Park or at the nearby Songshan Railway Station.
When he called the 1999 Taipei Citizen Hotline, staff told him that workers at the system provider went off-duty before midnight, forcing him to spend 30 minutes finding a parking space on Yongji Road.
“The YouBike system is a 24-hour service, but it cannot address users’ problems at midnight. It’s hard to rent a bicycle and even harder to return it. The customer service needs a lot of improvement,” he said in the complaint.
The Department of Transportation said it recognized the problem, and said it would send more bicycles to some stops while removing bicycles from the racks regularly, so users can find spaces.
According to Shen Hui-hung (沈彗虹), a division chief in the department, the lack of parking spaces is more serious at stops in residential areas between 11pm and 1am, and he said the department will strengthen the dispatch starting at 10pm in those areas.
Giant YouBike scheme spokesperson Vicky Liu (劉麗珠) said Giant would also try to improve the situation. Meanwhile, users can check for empty racks at the kiosk at each stop. If they cannot find a space, users can register their EasyCard at the kiosk and extend the free-of-charge period for another 60 minutes.
The YouBike scheme has 116,000 registered users and the number of daily rentals has reached 25,000 on weekdays and 27,000 on weekends.
The Department of Transportation has installed 62 YouBike rental stops so far, with 2,132 bicycles.
It plans to increase the number of locations to 162 by the end of the year, making the scheme more accessible to commuters.
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
BITTERLY COLD: The inauguration ceremony for US president-elect Donald Trump has been moved indoors due to cold weather, with the new venue lacking capacity A delegation of cross-party lawmakers from Taiwan, led by Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), for the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump, would not be able to attend the ceremony, as it is being moved indoors due to forecasts of intense cold weather in Washington tomorrow. The inauguration ceremony for Trump and US vice president-elect JD Vance is to be held inside the Capitol Rotunda, which has a capacity of about 2,000 people. A person familiar with the issue yesterday said although the outdoor inauguration ceremony has been relocated, Taiwan’s legislative delegation has decided to head off to Washington as scheduled. The delegation
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
RSS