Tour Buses: Why Has This Iron Box Carrying Taiwan's People Up Mountains and Across Seas for Six Decades Always Been Involved in Accidents?

At 9:30 PM on February 13, 2017, at the Nangang System Interchange where Highway 5 meets Highway 3, a tour bus carrying a cherry blossom viewing group from Wuling Farm plunged from an elevated ramp. The vehicle disintegrated, killing 33 people on the spot and leaving 11 severely injured¹. Driver Kang Yu-hsün had started scheduling vehicles at 4:00 AM that day, working continuously for over 16 hours; he too died in the wreckage². Prosecutors later decided not to prosecute any defendants, citing that "responsibility attribution was difficult to determine"³—a disaster that took 33 lives ended with no one legally held accountable.

30-Second Overview: Tour buses are Taiwan's most populist post-war tourism transport. From the "automobiles" attached to the Railway Bureau during the Japanese colonial era, the 1959 Golden Horse bus and its boat-hat-wearing "Golden Horse Misses," to the wild buses dominating national highways in the 1980s, and today's pilgrimage groups, employee tours, and school trips, almost every Taiwanese has a memory of "singing karaoke on a tour bus." However, the industry has long been hijacked by the "agency" (kao-hsing) system—owners register under travel agencies, which compete on low tour fees, forcing drivers into overtime. After the Van Gogh's Sunflowers crash, the working hour cap shifted from "unregulated" to "90,000 NTD fine for exceeding 11 hours"⁴, and on New Year's Day 2026, mandatory driver identity verification equipment was added for clocking in⁵. As long as the market remains kinged by low tour fees, the next overturn is only a matter of time.

From Colonial "Automobiles" to Post-Liberation Takeover: The Forgotten Origins

To discuss tour buses, one must return to the Japanese era. At that time, Taiwan's highway passenger transport was divided into two sectors: main lines were operated concurrently by the Governor-General's Transportation Bureau Railway Department, while secondary routes were managed by over 20 private "automobile" businesses, with equity largely held by Japanese interests⁶. The term "automobile" (jidōsha) simply meant cars in Japanese—these operators ran short-distance passenger services in Hsinchu, Chiayi, and Pingtung, using mostly imported small cars or buses. Equipment was rudimentary, roads rugged, but they were the lifeline connecting townships to the outside world.

The profession of "conductor" was born in this era. In 1944, 14-year-old Yu Liu Ju-lan passed the exam to become a conductor for Taiwan Railway Corporation (the predecessor of Hsinchu Bus)—she had originally been accepted as a switchboard operator at the Dahu Police Station but switched professions for the higher pay; during the late war, she even hid from air raids and transported wounded soldiers⁷. The Taiwanese Hokkien term "tshia-tsiáng-á" (conductor) is a phonetic translation of the Japanese "shashō," a term used until the 1980s.

The post-1945 Liberation period was a time of chaos: Japanese-owned shares were taken over by the Taiwan Provincial Highway Bureau, established in 1946, which appointed personnel to serve as directors and supervisors. Private equity was reorganized into automobile passenger companies under ROC law—Fengyuan Bus, Hsinchu Bus, Chiayi Bus, Pingtung Bus, and Kaohsiung Bus all took shape in these years⁶. Taking over Japanese vehicles was chaotic: vehicle conditions varied, parts were hard to find, and driver training was insufficient. Coupled with the influx of military and civilian resettlement needs after 1949, highway passenger transport gradually shifted from a "military/logistical" logic to civilian tourism. It was during this time that private small-scale passenger transport began to sprout in the 1950s—many bosses bought one or two vehicles and registered them under passenger companies to take scattered contracts. This was the earliest prototype of the legal frameworks for "agency" (kao-hsing) and "full-vehicle charter."

From Golden Horse to Kuokong: The Golden Age of Highway Passenger Transport

What truly made "riding a long-distance bus" a universal experience was the Golden Horse (Jinma Hao), launched by the Highway Bureau in 1959—named after "Kinmen and Matsu," the air-conditioned bus featured service staff in narrow skirts, running from Taipei to Kaohsiung, Taitung, and Hualien⁸. In 1961, the Golden Horse drove onto the newly opened Central Cross-Island Highway, becoming the primary transport for Lishan tourism; photos of Lishan Station from that era are filled with Golden Horses waiting to go up the mountain⁹. After the Zhongxiao Expressway fully opened in 1978, the Highway Bureau upgraded to launch the Kuokong Bus (Guoguang Hao), featuring double-row seats and air conditioning, described by passengers at the time as a "mobile hotel"¹⁰.

However, the "Highway Bureau / Taiwan Bus" was a state-owned system running fixed routes. The industry line that truly carried "tourism" business was another one: the Tour Bus Passenger Transport Industry. Its legal definition is unique: "operating by chartering vehicles for passengers"¹¹. In other words, tour buses cannot sell single tickets like buses; they must be rented as a "whole vehicle" to travel agencies, schools, temples, or corporations. This "full-vehicle charter" characteristic later became the structural cause of its accidents.

It is worth noting that the "flight attendant-style" marketing of the Golden Horse Misses was actually a brand strategy of the Highway Bureau—by 1959, small private tour buses had already begun to appear sporadically. The Highway Bureau had to establish a "national team" brand with higher-specification services to maintain its monopoly.

Golden Horse Misses: Taiwan's First "Flight Attendants" on the Highway

When the Golden Horse launched in 1959, the Highway Bureau recruited its first batch of 20 "Golden Horse Misses" for onboard service. They wore blue narrow-skirt uniforms, boat-shaped hats, and carried black shoulder bags. Their work was to "blow whistles to assist drivers in reversing to stations and serve passengers on board"—handing out hot towels, pouring tea, announcing stops, and comforting motion-sick passengers⁸.

The exam for Golden Horse Misses was as difficult as selecting flight attendants: height, education, demeanor, and foreign language skills were all mandatory. The monthly salary was 600 NTD—twice that of a primary school teacher at the time¹². Applicants crowded in, with an acceptance rate of less than 10%. The first generation of Golden Horse Misses are still invited by media to "reunite" and recall the past; at nearly 70 years old, they demonstrate the skill of pouring tea with one hand flipping a cup, a page of Taiwan's transportation history imbued with human warmth¹³.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Highway Bureau buses, tour buses, and even city buses still had conductor missies, a childhood memory for many 1950s and 1960s babies. It was not until the 1980s, when drivers combined fare collection and automatic coin boxes became popular, that the profession of conductor gradually disappeared from Taiwan's streets: the exit of the Golden Horse Misses (the Golden Horse bus stopped running in 1980) was almost the period's full stop⁸.

Pilgrimage Groups, Employee Tours, and Karaoke: The Iron Box of Populist Tourism

For post-war Taiwanese, tour buses were not just a means of transport but a social space.

From the 1970s onward, with economic takeoff and the implementation of the weekend rest system, three major demands pushed the tour bus industry to its peak: employee tours, school trips, and temple pilgrimage groups. Pilgrimage activities at Beigang Chaotian Temple and Dajia Jhenlan Temple often mobilized over a hundred tour buses. Middle and primary school graduation trips are many 1960s and 1970s babies' earliest memories of "tour buses": the karaoke microphone on the bus, plastic seat covers, the ice bucket in the back row, and the bento box are almost the shared sensory memories of this generation.

The later emergence of Aloha Bus (established in 1999) represents another transformation: originally a national highway passenger operator, it lost passengers after the High-Speed Rail opened in 2007. Impacted by COVID-19, it stopped operations in February 2022 and officially transformed into a tour bus company in August, surviving on chartered tours and airport pickups¹⁴. This is a microcosm of highway passenger transport being forced to "flee" to the tour bus market in the HSR era, foreshadowing the structural transformation the entire industry had to face in the 2020s.

Wild Buses: The Grey Jungle on 1980s Highways

If the agency system is the structural lesion of the tour bus industry, the "wild bus" is the earliest suppurating wound of that lesion.

The story returns to 1978, after the Zhongxiao Expressway opened. At that time, long-distance passenger transport was monopolized by the state-owned Taiwan Bus (Highway Bureau Passenger Transport). A ticket from Taipei to Kaohsiung cost 350 NTD, schedules were few, and buying tickets required queuing until dark. The market had a huge demand gap: someone came up with a solution—using a legal tour bus license to illegally solicit scattered passengers near stations, charging per head. The price was only half that of Taiwan Bus, and vehicle conditions were sometimes newer than the Kuokong Bus. This was commonly known as the "wild bus"¹⁵.

The term "wild" (yeji) comes from Taiwanese Hokkien slang, originally referring to prostitutes, later引申 to mean illegal operators without licenses soliciting passengers anywhere. In the 1980s, near Taipei Railway Station, Taichung Chengcheng Station, and Kaohsiung Rear Railway Station, crowds of young men holding signs shouting "Taipei, Taichung, Hsinchu" were always squeezed together, with tour buses waiting in alleys. When police arrived, passengers scattered like birds, and vehicles drove away immediately, only to return an hour later: this cat-and-mouse game lasted for a full decade¹⁶.

The problem with wild buses was not just "illegal operation." Since tour buses were originally only for "full-vehicle charter," they should not have sold tickets per head, meaning vehicle insurance did not cover this business model: if an accident occurred, passengers could not get compensation. Coupled with drivers wanting to make more trips and owners wanting to cut costs, overloading, speeding, and insufficient vehicle maintenance were all rampant. The background of many major tour bus accidents on national highways in the 1980s almost always involved wild buses.

The turning point was 1989. After years of petitions and protests by operators, the Ministry of Transportation finally opened national highway passenger transport to private enterprise. Unibus became Taiwan's first legal private national highway passenger carrier, launching from Taipei and Kaohsiung in both directions on November 17, 1989, directly cutting ticket prices to 60-70% of Taiwan Bus's, challenging the Highway Bureau's decades-long monopoly head-on¹⁵. The wild bus market was absorbed by legal operators, and the term slowly disappeared from news pages.

But the "wild bus spirit" did not truly disappear. After the 2010s, tour bus operators still illegally engaged in national highway passenger transport, with cases caught by authorities frequently appearing in the news[^17]: as long as there is still demand for "cheap, convenient, and detail-ignoring" in the market, tour buses will always oscillate between the grey areas of legality and illegality.

Agency System: The Political Economy of This Industry

The most critical structural problem of the tour bus industry is called "agency" (kao-hsing).

According to Article 19-2 of the Rules for the Management of Automobile Transport Industries, to operate a tour bus passenger transport business, one must apply for a company license, meet minimum capital requirements, minimum vehicle thresholds, have a own business office, and a own maintenance factory¹⁷. This threshold was originally designed to "eliminate small operators and prevent bad money from driving out good": but the actual effect was exactly the opposite. Individual vehicle owners could not afford these fixed costs, so they operated by "personally buying a vehicle (costing millions per car) and registering under a company." The vehicle is personally owned, but the license, insurance, and business registration are under the company's name. The company collects a monthly "agency fee" (ranging from thousands to over ten thousand NTD per car).

This system was laid bare during the 2017 Van Gogh's Sunflowers case: the肇事 vehicle was registered under Youli Transport, but in fact, nearly 100 of Youli's 136 tour buses were agency vehicles, and the Van Gogh's Sunflowers travel agency had illegally operated tour bus business under the "agency of Youli" for two years¹⁸. The Control Yuan corrected the Highway Bureau, Tourism Bureau, and Ministry of Labor, explicitly stating: the agency model causes "inappropriate exploitation of drivers' labor rights and endangers passenger life safety," and competent authorities "failed to implement inspections and penalties according to law"¹⁹.

This system creates three fatal problems:

First, dispersed responsibility. When an accident occurs, travel agencies blame tour bus companies, tour bus companies blame agency vehicle owners, and agency vehicle owners blame drivers. In judicial practice, courts often determine that the vehicle company bears joint liability²⁰, but in actual compensation claims, vehicle companies often transfer assets or declare dissolution, making judgments unenforceable for victims. In the Van Gogh's Sunflowers case, the Shilin District Procuratorate decided not to prosecute eight defendants, citing "difficulty in determining responsibility attribution"[^3]: this is almost an inevitable result of the agency system.

Second, price collapse. Agency vehicle owners, desperate to amortize car loans, fuel, and maintenance, must desperately take cases. Travel agencies know owners are eager for work and squeeze prices down. Coupled with multi-layer subcontracting, the "one-day tour low-price groups" since the 1990s are products of this structure: tour fees are unreasonably low, operators rely on shopping station commissions and forced shopping to make up the difference, and drivers are forced to run two or three itineraries a day. This is a typical "small capital entry, large risk spillover": fixed costs are absorbed by vehicle owners, and risks are ultimately borne by passengers' lives.

Third, reform is hard to shake. After Van Gogh's Sunflowers, public opinion was outraged, and the Control Yuan issued corrections. The Ministry of Transportation promised a "comprehensive review of agency," but as of 2026, the agency system has not been fundamentally abolished. The competent authorities' recent policy focus has even shifted to the license fee chaos of taxi agency. For tour buses, years of reform have bypassed the core, remaining at the superficial level of "adding GPS, increasing penalties, and conducting evaluations."

Van Gogh's Sunflowers, Alishan, and Meiling: A Blood-Written Accident Ledger

Major tour bus accidents in Taiwan seem to repeat every few years.

December 12, 2010: A tour bus on the Dapang Highway in Alishan Township overturned into a valley, killing 3 and injuring 25²¹.

July 19, 2016: On the Guoyi Highway (National Highway 2) Taoyuan Airport Link Road, a tour bus carrying a Liaoning tour group caught fire. The doors could not be opened; all 26 people on board—24 mainland tourists, the driver, and the guide—died. The Control Yuan later corrected the Ministry of Transportation, pointing out major deficiencies in vehicle escape design, safety door training, and operator agency management²².

February 13, 2017: Van Gogh's Sunflowers cherry blossom tour group overturned on National Highway 5, killing 33. Driver Kang Yu-hsün worked from 4:30 AM to 9:00 PM that day, with continuous working hours exceeding 16 hours. He had just had his license suspended for drunk driving earlier in the year, yet the company still scheduled him for the trip².

March 20, 2024: A tour bus coming down from Alishan in Renwu District, Kaohsiung, crashed into a culvert. Driver Deng had been on duty for 15 hours that day²³.

April 28, 2025: On the Wuyang Elevated Section of National Highway 1 in Taoyuan, a tour bus's engine smoked and caught fire while driving. The driver urgently stopped on the shoulder to evacuate 24 passengers. The vehicle immediately fell into a sea of fire. The driver's eyes were injured by thick smoke, and two passengers suffered minor injuries[^25]: the short escape time and the speed of the vehicle burning once again proved that the lesson of the 2016 National Highway 2 fire was not truly absorbed by the industry.

After every accident, competent authorities declare a "comprehensive review," but the next accident always arrives on time within a few years. The accident chapter occupies only one-seventh of this article, but they are actually the most direct thermometer of the industry's lesions.

11 Hours, Clocking In, Facial Recognition: The New System on New Year's Day 2026

The most important legal progress after Van Gogh's Sunflowers occurred in 2022: the Ministry of Transportation amended Article 86-4 of the Rules for the Management of Automobile Transport Industries, explicitly stating tour bus drivers must not work more than 11 hours from check-in to end of work, and continuous driving must not exceed 4 hours, with a maximum fine of 90,000 NTD for violations⁴.

But the loopholes in execution are obvious: the driving recorder only records the "vehicle," not the "person." One vehicle can be driven up the mountain by Driver A and down by Driver B; calculated separately, neither exceeds the time limit. As long as competent authorities cannot prove it is the same person driving, the penalty clause is a dead letter.

Thus, the new system on New Year's Day 2026: the Ministry of Transportation issued an amendment to the Rules for the Management of Automobile Transport Industries on April 27, 2025, mandating that all approximately 14,000 tour buses nationwide install "driver identity verification equipment." Drivers must use employee cards, IC cards, or facial recognition to clock in before working. Coupled with driving recorders and GPS, competent authorities can precisely grasp "who drove for how long"⁵. A May 2025 research report by the Legislative Yuan Legal Affairs Bureau also pointed out that this system fills the inspection loophole of "vehicle-person separation" since 2017²⁴.

But the new system is controversial: the Highway Bureau only subsidizes a maximum of 2,000 NTD per vehicle. A full set of installations (card readers, sensors, backend systems) costs between 3,000 and 10,000 NTD. The difference is absorbed by operators, and unions have protested that drivers bear the cost themselves²⁵. Travel agencies must adjust itineraries to avoid rushing. But under the low tour fee structure, execution ultimately relies on inspection energy, not operator self-discipline. Old problems like passengers "not wearing seatbelts" and vehicle escape door design defects were not addressed in this wave of amendments.

The Industry in Numbers: 14,000 Vehicles, 900 Operators, and Structural Shrinkage

According to the latest Tour Bus Operation Status Survey by the Ministry of Transportation Statistics Division, as of the end of 2021, there were still 907 tour bus operators and approximately 14,000 tour buses in operation in the Taiwan-Matsu region²⁶. Compared to 944 operators and 16,830 vehicles at the end of 2015²⁷, both the number of operators and vehicles have declined: nearly 3,000 vehicles disappeared in six years. Behind this are three forces squeezing simultaneously:

• HSR eating into domestic tourism market: After the HSR opened in 2007, the structural demand for long-distance group tourism in the western corridor declined. Chartered vehicles shifted from "point-to-point movement" to "scenic area shuttle."
• Rise of independent travel: The younger generation prefers small groups, self-driving, and booking apps. The demand for full-vehicle charter converges upward.
• COVID-19 Impact: Group tourism nearly halted from 2020 to 2022. Some operators went bankrupt, and some vehicles were scrapped without replacement. The number of new vehicle registrations had not returned to pre-pandemic levels as of 2025.

However, the pressure of aging vehicle age has intensified. Tour buses can legally be used for 15 years (Class A large buses), but under the pressure of low profit margins, many operators push vehicles to the limit. The肇事 vehicle in the 2017 Van Gogh's Sunflowers accident was manufactured in 2009, already 8 years old. The vehicle disintegrated during the high-speed overturn, making "structural strength" one of the key points of post-accident review.

The industry simultaneously faces three unresolved transformation challenges: green energy bus electrification policy promotion is slow, with operators waiting for subsidies. Driver aging and labor shortage, where high dual-driver costs make scheduling long-distance trips difficult under the 2026 new system. And fragmented transformation directions: a few operators have shifted to airport pickups, corporate charters, science park shuttles, or scenic area buses (such as Shilinxi, Formosan Aboriginals Culture Village), but "refuge-style" transformation has not yet become an industry consensus.

Comparative Perspective: Why Can Europe Do It, But Taiwan Cannot?

The EU has very strict special laws for long-distance bus driver working hours (EC 561/2006): daily driving limit is 9 hours (twice a week can be extended to 10 hours), continuous driving of 4.5 hours must be followed by a 45-minute break, long-distance routes mandate dual drivers, and real-time inspection is conducted through full-vehicle digital monitoring (Tachograph). Taiwan's 2022 11-hour limit and 2026 driver identification equipment are directionally correct but still much looser, and dual drivers are not mandatory.

The Control Yuan has corrected the Ministry of Transportation multiple times regarding tour bus accidents in the past decade, but historical reforms have shown "treating the head when it aches": GPS, penalties, evaluations, and identification equipment have come in waves, but the core of the agency system and low-price competition has never been cracked. Possible fundamental solutions: mandating market price negotiation (statutory minimum prices from travel agencies to vehicle companies to drivers), mandating higher caps on liability insurance, accelerating old-for-new subsidies, and gradually restricting or fully regulating agency: all discussed after each accident, but shelved after public opinion recedes.

Consumers are not outsiders either. The Highway Bureau publishes tour bus operator safety evaluation grades (Class A, B, C) annually. Since 2026, it has also reminded renters to actively inquire about driver working hour regulations⁵. But the commercial model of low-price groups "shopping station commissions" still has its market. In the independent travel era, some consumers also prefer "cheap full-vehicle charter": as long as the price sensitivity on the demand side does not change, the supply side will always have someone taking risks.

How Can It Continue?

After Van Gogh's Sunflowers, the Ministry of Transportation promoted "Tour Bus Safety Management Evaluation," amended laws to limit working hours to 11 hours, and mandated driver identity verification equipment on New Year's Day 2026. But the fundamental problem: the agency system and low tour fee competition has not been solved.

This iron box carrying Taiwan's people up mountains and across seas for sixty years, from the colonial era's "automobiles," the chaos of post-war takeover, the elegance of Golden Horse Misses pouring tea with one hand, to the long coexistence of wild buses and the agency system, to the 33 lives of Van Gogh's Sunflowers: its story is actually the story of how Taiwan's post-war "populist tourism cheap dividend" was swallowed by industrial structure.

The next accident is indeed "only a matter of time" unless the entire ecology (supply, demand, supervision) is rebalanced. What is needed is not just more GPS and card readers, but a renegotiation of the entire industry: travel agencies willing to offer reasonable tour fees, vehicle companies willing to pay reasonable driver salaries, consumers willing to pay a little more for safety, and competent authorities willing to handle the deep-buried bomb of agency.

Otherwise, the next tour bus falling from an interchange or burning into a fireball on the Wuyang Elevated Section will always be on the road.

Further Reading: Golden Horse Misses, Conductor Missies, Unibus, Aloha Bus, National Highway 5, Taiwan Tourism Industry, Labor Standards Act, Rules for the Management of Automobile Transport Industries

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