SAFETY CONCERN: Over the past two years, 87 percent of freeway collisions involved vehicles equipped with advanced driver assistance systems, a legislator saidBy Shelley Shan / Staff reporter
By Shelley Shan / Staff reporterLawmakers on the legislature’s Transportation Committee yesterday asked the Ministry of Transportation and Communications to review its management system of slopes along highways and freeways after a landslide on the southbound side of National Sun Yat-sen Freeway （Freeway No. 1） on Tuesday caused severe congestion during peak-hour traffic yesterday morning.
The sales revenue of the nation’s 15 freeway service areas last year dropped about 17 percent as a spike in locally COVID-19 transmitted cases affected travel, the Freeway Bureau said yesterday.
The surge in domestic cases led the Central Epidemic Command Center to raise the COVID-19 alert nationwide to level 3 in the middle of May last year. The alert lasted until July 27.
Under the level 3 alert, people were banned from dining in at restaurants, and shopping areas and food courts in the freeway service areas were closed during the three-day Dragon Boat Festival holiday, which was unprecedented,
One person was killed and three were injured in a nine-vehicle pileup on a southbound section of National Sun Yat-sen Freeway (Freeway No. 1) in Kaohsiung, police said yesterday.
The crash occurred at about 10am near the 373.1km mark southbound on the freeway, near the Qijing-Kaohsiung Port exit, police said.
Four people were rushed to hospitals, police said.
One of them, a 47-year-old man surnamed Wu (吳), had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, police said.
Wu was declared dead by doctors at about midday.
Another man in his 40s, who had no obvious lacerations, and two women, who reported chest pain, were taken to three different