It’s not far from Pingtung City Centre (TRA Station) but Pingtung city is not really a big city and many people in Pingtung shop and work in Kaoshuing which is 15-40 min. drive for most people in Pingtung City so not sure the reason for this other than benefit a few people. The Bullet train station location listed in Pingtung is near the Kaoshuing-Pingtung City line, and is already connected by the new underground Metro with like a new $US billion dollar TRA line. It seems this extension to me not worth the money spent, but hey it looks good. The new station would be better if it were farther south instead of being so near Kaoshuing as it looks now.
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Yep agreed if there was one closer to Hengchun that would be amazing.
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It’s for the NS connection.
Yes, it is. It will be interesting to see how they schedule the trains. If the fastest trains (one/two stops) do not serve Pingtung I still think a few people will use the current Kaoshuing station as now a few people in Tainan backtrack to take the faster trains. I would rather see the billions in dollars spent on upgrading the National Uni’s in Pingtung, as the Uni’s are key in the Hsinchu and Tainan Science/Tech Parks doing well as well the king of Tech centres, Silicon Valley (ie Stanford + Cal/ UC Berk).
Nice thought but, Pingtung is the breadbasket. Start tech there and you’ll have your eggplant tasting like circuit boards. There’s an aging power plant in Hengchun that’ll be tapped out necessitating a coal or gas burner which’ll be more expenses. Jobs, sure, but expensive and grafty. This THSR grift is the latest scam of those real estate twats. They’ve tapped out the Taipei/Taichung/Tainan/Kaohsiung money under the mattress folks and are moving their game on to the hold-outs in farmsville.
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I presume there is also (in addition to the real estate speculation game) a political element here—to ensure that every county (not including Hualien / Taitung, or of course the outlying islands) gets an HSR station regardless of whether it is practical or economical to do so. Hence the mushrooming of stations in Miaoli, Changhua, Yunlin…
Guy
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Due to Taiwan’s plummeting pop and out migration from the South it doesn’t make sense to place a HSR station there economically but the graft possibilities are endless indeed.