A call for tenders to create kiosks and indoor navigation systems to guide visitors inside Taipei Railway Station and facilitate evacuations during emergencies is to be launched next month, the Taipei City Government said yesterday.
The city government held a public hearing attended by IT firms to explain details of the bidding process.
The selected bidder would be required to deploy 8,000 to 13,000 indoor positioning devices, known as beacons, to give visitors directions in the railway station, as well as kiosks at eight locations, including Beimen MRT Station and Taipei City Mall, which are linked to the main station through underground passageways, guiding foreigners and other visitors to Taipei around the station, Taipei Traffic Engineering Office Liu Jui-lin (劉瑞麟) said.
By activating Bluetooth connections and an app on mobile devices, visitors would be able to open a map showing their location in the station and the way to their destination, such as underground shopping areas and the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) or High Speed Rail passenger platforms, Liu said.
The kiosks should be able to show users three-dimensional maps of all levels of the station, while electronic signs would be set up in the Beimen Station and Taipei Railway Station to inform people of the safest escape route in the case of an emergency, he said.
“The signs would be integrated. If there is smoke coming from Beimen, people need to know in which direction they should evacuate,” Liu said.
The project contractor is to be selected based on what value-added services bidders can provide the municipal government, which in turn would pay the contractor from revenue generated from two public parking lots on Civic Boulevard and firms who pay for advertisements in the app and in the station, he said.
“The routes in Taipei Railway Station are messy and people often get lost. So, the primary goal is to improve the signage,” Taipei Department of Transportation section head Chang Sheng-wan (張生萬) said.
Disaster prevention stations are to be established by the TRA at the behest of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications on the Taipei Railway Station’s second and third underground levels, Chang said.
The center is to integrate TRA, Taipei Rapid Transit Corp and High Speed Rail systems, thereby facilitating evacuation, he said.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS