By Shelley Shan / Staff Reporter
More than 100 taxis, tour buses and trucks are to surround the Ministry of Transportation and Communications tomorrow to protest tougher penalties for automobile drivers.
The penalties, which took effect in June, were designed to penalize drivers who disregard the right of way for pedestrians, including a two-month driver’s license suspension if a driver accumulates 12 penalty points in one year.
A driver’s license would be revoked if the license is suspended twice in two years and if the driver accumulates additional points. Since the new penalties took effect in June, taxi drivers are often handed a NT$600 fine and one point for illegal parking, National Drivers’ Alliance Chairman Liu Hung-chang (劉鴻樟) said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
“If a taxi driver’s license was suspended for two months after having accumulated 12 penalty points, it means they cannot work for two months, and they might not have other means to support themselves,” Liu said.
“Taxi drivers do not deliberately contravene traffic laws. Breaches of traffic regulations happen frequently because roads are ill-designed, having too many parking spaces for scooters and cars on the roadside,” he added.
There is also a lack of temporary parking zones in road sections where roadside parking is not available, Liu said, adding that taxi drivers are forced to break rules whenever a passenger hails a cab. Taxi drivers are frequently caught contravening traffic laws because some people make a living by using dashboard cameras to record contraventions and submit the evidence to collect cash prizes, he said.
“If a taxi driver can earn NT$3,000 per day, they would not have much left over if they were given two tickets that day for illegal parking,” he said, adding that the same problem has occurred with truck drivers as well. The ministry was passing the buck to local governments when the alliance told the ministry about the problem, Liu said.
“When we expressed our grievances to local government officials and hoped that they would reconfigure where red lines and yellow lines are drawn, we were vaguely told that yellow lines would be drawn as much as possible,” Liu said.
In Taiwan, parking or waiting is not allowed along red curbside lines, while five-minute waiting is allowed next to yellow curbs. The alliance specifically demanded that 10m to 12m-long yellow lines be drawn for every 150m of red lines, so motor vehicles could safely load and unload passengers and goods, Liu said.
Yellow lines should be drawn every 10m to 20m at every intersection, he said.
The ministry said it is working with local governments to create 456 temporary parking zones for car drivers.
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