TRA reform before upgrades: expert
Apr 16, 2021
Taipei Times
Excerpt
The government should stop all railway projects and allocate funding to rebuild the Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA), a transportation expert said in a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday.
The committee held a public hearing to explore ways to reform the agency after Taroko Express No. 408 on April 2 crashed inside a tunnel in Hualien County after slamming into a crane truck near the tunnel’s entrance, killing 49 people and injuring 244.
Several transportation experts were invited to share their views, with some of them having been previously recruited by the Executive Yuan to examine the TRA after the derailment of a Puyuma Express train in 2018, which killed 18 people and injured 215.
“The situation facing the TRA today is the result of a wrong government policy that has been implemented for 30 years, which has prohibited the agency from raising the ticket price for more than two decades,” said Anne Chung (鍾慧諭), deputy director of Feng Chia University’s Innovation Center for Intelligent Transportation and Logistics, who was from 2014 to 2016 Taipei Department of Transportation commissioner.
The agency has accumulated losses of NT$430 billion, of which more than NT$100 billion was caused by an old pension system, she said.
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