By Chris Wang / Staff reporter
Taipei leads the country with more than 46 percent of the nation’s invalid traffic tickets issued by the Taipei police, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) caucus said yesterday.
The errors came in all sorts of “ridiculous” forms, such as fining a nine-year-old boy for drunk driving, citing a driver for speeding at more than 1,000kph and fining a motorcyclist for not wearing a seat belt, TSU Legislator Huang Wen-ling (黃文玲) told a press conference.
“This shows that Taipei traffic police must dramatically improve the quality of their law enforcement,” Huang said.
Taipei traffic police issued 1,383 erroneous tickets, either by miswriting or citing the wrong law, between January and June this year, accounting for more than 46 percent of the national total of 3,018 bad tickets and ranking first among the nation’s 21 cities and counties, according to statistics Huang provided.
The statistics also showed that the situation is getting worse, since the 3,018 bad tickets written in the first half of this year was almost on par with the 3,339 bad tickets for the whole of last year.
One in every 607 traffic tickets in Taipei was written improperly, Huang said.
Of the five special municipalities, Taipei was followed by New Taipei City (新北市), Greater Kaohsiung, Greater Taichung and Greater Tainan, Huang said.
Despite the ticketing error, many people decided to pay the fines anyway because they did not want to go through the complicated appeals process and waiting period, she said.