Taiwan | High speed rail to see 500 millionth passenger this month
Taipei: The Taiwan High-Speed Rail Corp. (THSRC) said on Monday that they are expecting to see it’s 500 millionth passenger near the end of July and this will add a series of event which will be held to celebrate the occasion. As the company said about 496 million tickets as be sold as of 1 July since the high-speed rail was in operation since 5 January 2007 and they estimated they will serve 500 million passengers by the end of the month, currently the train is running from Nangang to Zuoying in as little as 1:45 hours, reaching almost 90% of Taiwan"s population. Ridership fell short of the estimate, but it grew from 40,000 passengers per day and in the first few months of operation to more than 1,29,000 passengers per day in June 2013. Daily passenger traffic reached 1,30,000 in 2014, well below the forecast of 2,40,000 daily passengers for 2008. The system carried it’s first 100 million passengers by August 2010 and over 200 million passengers had taken the sys...