Tour Bus: The Iron Box That Has Carried Taiwanese People Over Mountains and Seas for Sixty Years — Why Does It Keep Crashing?

At 9:30 p.m. on February 13, 2017, at the Nangang System Interchange connecting National Freeway No. 5 to No. 3, a tour bus carrying a Wuling Farm cherry-blossom tour group rolled off an elevated ramp. The vehicle broke apart on impact. Thirty-three people were killed instantly, eleven seriously injured¹. The driver, Kang Yu-hsun, had been on duty since 4:00 a.m. that morning, working more than 16 consecutive hours. He died in the wreckage². Prosecutors later declined to indict any defendant, citing "difficulty in determining where responsibility lay"³ — a disaster that took 33 lives, and in the end, no one was held legally accountable.

30-Second Overview: The tour bus is the most populist form of tourist transport in postwar Taiwan. From the Japanese colonial era's "jidōsha" (automobiles), to the 1959 Golden Horse Express, to the Golden Horse Misses in their boat-shaped caps, to the wild chicken buses that ruled the freeways in the 1980s, to today's pilgrimage tours, corporate outings, and school field trips — nearly every Taiwanese person has a memory of singing karaoke on a tour bus. But the industry has long been shackled by the "affiliation" (kàoháng) system: bus owners register under tour agencies, agencies undercut each other on rock-bottom tour prices, and drivers are forced to work overtime. After the Dielianhua crash, the working-hour cap went from "unregulated" to "11 hours, with a fine of up to NT$90,000"⁴, and on January 1, 2026, driver identification devices became mandatory — drivers must clock in by card or facial recognition before starting work⁵. But as long as the market still worships the lowest bid, the next rollover is only a matter of time.

From the Japanese Colonial "Jidōsha" to Postwar Reception: A Forgotten Origin

To talk about tour buses, you have to go back to the Japanese era. At that time, Taiwan's road passenger transport was split into two tiers: main lines were operated by the Governor-General's Bureau of Railways, while secondary routes were served by more than 20 private "jidōsha" (automobile) companies operating in designated zones, most of them Japanese-owned⁶. These "jidōsha" — the Japanese word for automobile — ran short-haul passenger services in Hsinchu, Chiayi, Pingtung, and elsewhere, using mostly imported small buses or coaches. The equipment was rudimentary, the roads rough, but these were the lifelines connecting rural townships to the outside world.

It was during this period that the profession of the bus conductor was born. In 1944, 14-year-old Yu Liu Ju-lan passed the conductor exam for the Taiwan Railway Corporation (the predecessor of Hsinchu Bus). She had already been hired as a switchboard operator at the Dahu Police Station, but switched to conducting for the higher salary. During the final days of the war, she hid from air raids and transported wounded soldiers⁷. In Taiwanese Hokkien, "conductor" was transliterated from the Japanese "shashō" — called "tshia-tsiáng-á" (車掌仔) — a term that persisted into the 1980s.

The post-1945 retrocession period was chaotic: Japanese-held shares were taken over by the newly formed Taiwan Provincial Highway Bureau in 1946, with government-appointed directors and supervisors, while private shares were reorganized under Republic of China law into bus companies. The predecessors of Fengyuan Bus, Hsinchu Bus, Chiayi Bus, Pingtung Bus, and Kaohsiung Bus all took shape during these years⁶. The takeover of Japanese-era vehicles was disorderly: vehicles were in mixed condition, spare parts were hard to find, driver training was inadequate, and after 1949, the influx of demobilized military personnel and civilians relocating to Taiwan created enormous demand. Road passenger transport gradually shifted from a "military/evacuation" logic to civilian tourism. It was also during this period, in the 1950s, that private small-scale bus operations began to sprout — many owners bought one or two vehicles and registered them under existing bus companies to take on ad hoc charters. This was the earliest prototype of what would later become the "affiliation" and "whole-vehicle charter" legal framework.

From the Golden Horse Express to the Kuokuang Bus: The Golden Age of Road Passenger Transport

What truly made "taking a long-distance bus" a universal experience was the Golden Horse Express, launched by the Highway Bureau in 1959. The name was derived from "Kinmen and Matsu." Air-conditioned coaches paired with service attendants in narrow-skirt uniforms ran from Taipei all the way to Kaohsiung, Taitung, and Hualien⁸. In 1961, the Golden Horse Express began running on the newly opened Central Cross-Island Highway, becoming the main transport for tourists heading to Lishan. Photographs from the era show the Lishang station packed with Golden Horse buses waiting to head up the mountain⁹. After the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1) opened end-to-end in 1978, the Highway Bureau upgraded to the Kuokuang Bus, with double-row seating and air conditioning, described by passengers of the era as a "moving hotel"¹⁰.

But the Highway Bureau and its successor, the state-run Taiwan Motor Transport Corporation (TMTC), operated fixed routes. The actual "tourism" business belonged to a separate industry — tour bus passenger transport. Its legal definition is distinctive: "operating on a charter-rental basis"¹¹. In other words, a tour bus cannot sell individual tickets like a city bus; it must be rented out as a "whole vehicle" to travel agencies, schools, temples, or companies. This "whole-vehicle charter" characteristic later became the structural reason for its safety problems.

It is worth noting that the "stewardess-style" marketing of the Golden Horse Misses was in fact a branding strategy by the Highway Bureau. By 1959, small private tour buses had already begun to appear sporadically. The Bureau needed to establish a higher-service "national team" brand to maintain its monopoly position.

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

When the Golden Horse Express launched in 1959, the Highway Bureau recruited 20 "Golden Horse Misses" to serve on board. They wore blue narrow-skirt uniforms, boat-shaped caps, and black shoulder bags. Their job was to "blow a whistle to assist the driver in reversing and pulling into the station, and to serve passengers on board" — handing out hot towels, pouring tea, announcing stops, and soothing carsick passengers⁸.

The recruitment process for Golden Horse Misses was as competitive as a flight attendant selection: height, education, poise, and foreign-language ability were all required. The monthly salary was NT$600 — twice the pay of an elementary school teacher at the time¹². Applicants flooded in, and the acceptance rate was less than ten percent. The first generation of Golden Horse Misses are still invited by the media to reunite and reminisce. Now in their seventies, they demonstrate the signature trick of flipping a teacup and pouring tea with one hand — one of the most human chapters in Taiwan's transportation history¹³.

From the 1960s through the 1970s, Highway Bureau coaches, tour buses, and even city buses all had female conductors — a childhood memory for many of Taiwan's baby-boom generation. It was not until the 1980s, when drivers began collecting fares themselves and coin boxes became standard, that the conductor profession gradually disappeared from Taiwan's streets. The retirement of the Golden Horse Misses (the Golden Horse Express was discontinued in 1980) marked almost the final chapter of this history⁸.

Pilgrimage Tours, Corporate Outings, and Karaoke: The Iron Box of Populist Tourism

For postwar Taiwanese, the tour bus was never just a vehicle — it was a social space.

After the 1970s, as the economy took off and the two-day weekend became standard, three major demands drove the tour bus industry to its peak: corporate outings, school field trips, and temple pilgrimage tours. Pilgrimage events at Beigang Chaotian Temple and Dajia Zhenlan Temple could mobilize over a hundred tour buses at a time. Elementary and middle school graduation trips are, for many of Taiwan's Gen-X and elder Millennials, their earliest memory of a "tour bus" — the karaoke microphone, the plastic seat covers, the ice bucket and boxed lunches in the back row. These are almost universal sensory memories of a generation.

A later entrant, Aloha Bus (founded 1999), represents another kind of transition. Originally a freeway passenger carrier, it lost riders after the Taiwan High Speed Rail opened in 2007, and was further battered by COVID-19. It suspended operations in February 2022 and formally restructured as a tour bus company in August of that year, surviving on charter tours and airport transfers¹⁴. This is a microcosm of how, in the high-speed rail era, road passenger transport was forced to "retreat" into the tour bus market — and a preview of the structural transformation the entire industry would face in the 2020s.

Wild Chicken Buses: The Gray Jungle of 1980s Freeways

If the affiliation system is the structural disease of the tour bus industry, the "wild chicken bus" was its earliest suppurating wound.

The story goes back to the opening of the Sun Yat-sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1) in 1978. At the time, long-distance passenger transport was monopolized by the state-run TMTC (Highway Bureau coaches). A ticket from Taipei to Kaohsiung cost NT$350, schedules were limited, and people queued until dark to buy tickets. There was a massive gap in the market — and someone came up with a solution: use a legal tour bus license to illegally solicit individual passengers near bus stations, charging per head at half the TMTC price, sometimes in newer vehicles than the Kuokuang coaches. These were the so-called "wild chicken buses"¹⁵.

The term "wild chicken" (野雞) comes from Taiwanese slang, originally referring to streetwalkers, later extended to mean unlicensed operators who solicit customers on the spot. In the 1980s, the areas around Taipei Main Station, Taichung's Gancheng district, and Kaohsiung's Houyi Station were always crowded with touts holding cardboard signs shouting "Taipei! Taichung! Hsinchu!" Tour buses waited in side alleys, ready to depart. When police arrived, passengers scattered and the vehicles drove off — only to return an hour later. This cat-and-mouse game played out for a full decade¹⁶.

The problem with wild chicken buses was not just "operating illegally." Because tour buses were only supposed to be "whole-vehicle charters" and not sell tickets per head, vehicle insurance did not cover this mode of operation: in the event of an accident, passengers could not even claim compensation. On top of that, drivers ran extra trips to earn more, and owners cut costs however they could — overloading, speeding, and deferred maintenance were all standard practice. Nearly every major tour bus accident on the freeways in the 1980s had wild chicken buses lurking in the background.

The turning point came in 1989. After years of petitions and protests by operators, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications finally opened freeway passenger transport to private operators. United Highway Bus (Ubus) became Taiwan's first legal private freeway carrier, launching its inaugural Taipei–Kaohsiung service on November 17, 1989, slashing ticket prices to 60–70 percent of TMTC's fares and directly challenging the Highway Bureau's decades-long monopoly¹⁵. The wild chicken bus market was absorbed by legal operators, and the term gradually disappeared from the headlines.

But the "wild chicken spirit" never truly vanished. In the 2010s, there were still cases of tour bus operators illegally running freeway passenger services, caught by regulators and reported in the news¹⁷ — as long as the market still has demand for "cheap, convenient, and no-questions-asked" transport, tour buses will always oscillate between the legal and the illegal.

The Affiliation System: The Political Economy of This Industry

The most critical structural problem in the tour bus industry is called "kàoháng" (affiliation).

Under Article 19-2 of the Automobile Transport Industry Management Rules, to operate a tour bus passenger business, one must apply for a company license, meet minimum capital requirements, maintain a minimum number of vehicles, operate a dedicated business premises, and run a dedicated maintenance facility¹⁸. These thresholds were originally designed to "eliminate small operators and prevent a race to the bottom" — but the actual effect was the opposite: individual vehicle owners could not afford these fixed costs, so they adopted a model where "an individual buys the vehicle (costing several million NT dollars) and registers it under an existing company." The vehicle is privately owned, but the license, insurance, and business registration are all in the company's name. The company collects a monthly "affiliation fee" (ranging from several thousand to over ten thousand NT dollars per vehicle).

This system was exposed to public scrutiny after the 2017 Dielianhua crash: the vehicle involved was registered under Youli Transport, but in reality, nearly 100 of Youli's 136 tour buses were affiliated vehicles, and Dielianhua Travel Agency had itself been illegally operating tour buses under Youli's affiliation for two years¹⁹. The Control Yuan issued a correction against the Highway Bureau (under the MOTC), the Tourism Bureau, and the Ministry of Labor, explicitly stating that the affiliation model resulted in "the improper exploitation of drivers' labor rights and endangered passenger safety," and that the competent authorities "failed to carry out legally mandated inspections and penalties"²⁰.

This system creates three fatal problems:

First, diffused responsibility. When an accident occurs, the travel agency blames the tour bus company, the tour bus company blames the affiliated vehicle owner, and the owner blames the driver. In court practice, vehicle operators are often held jointly liable²¹, but in actual claims, operators frequently dissolve or hide their assets, leaving victims with judgments they cannot enforce. In the Dielianhua case, the Shilin District Prosecutors Office declined to indict any of the eight defendants, citing "difficulty in determining where responsibility lay"³ — an almost inevitable outcome of the affiliation system.

Second, price collapse. Affiliated vehicle owners, needing to cover car loans, fuel, and maintenance, must desperately take on jobs. Travel agencies, knowing owners are desperate, push prices down relentlessly. Layer upon layer of subcontracting produces the "one-day bargain tour" that has proliferated since the 1990s — tour fees so low they are irrational, forcing operators to make up the difference through shopping-stop commissions and forced purchases, while drivers are pressured to cram two or three itineraries into a single day. This is a textbook case of "small capital enters, large externalized risk": fixed costs are absorbed by the vehicle owner, while the ultimate risk is borne by the passengers' lives.

Third, reform is hard to enact. After Dielianhua, public outrage was intense and the Control Yuan issued its correction. The MOTC promised a "comprehensive review of the affiliation system," but as of 2026, the affiliation system has not been fundamentally abolished. The authorities' recent policy focus has even shifted to the license-fee chaos in the taxi affiliation system. On the tour bus side, years of reform have skirted the core issue, remaining at the surface level of "installing GPS, increasing penalties, and conducting evaluations."

Dielianhua, Alishan, and Meiling: A Ledger Written in Blood

Major tour bus accidents in Taiwan have recurred with grim regularity.

December 12, 2010: A tour bus plunged into a valley on Daban Road in Alishan Township, killing 3 and injuring 25²².

July 19, 2016: On the Taoyuan Airport Access Road (National Freeway No. 2), a tour bus carrying a Liaoning Province tour group caught fire. The doors would not open. All 26 people on board — 24 mainland Chinese tourists, the driver, and the tour guide — perished. The Control Yuan later issued a correction against the MOTC, citing critical deficiencies in vehicle escape-door design, safety-door training, and the management of affiliated operators²³.

February 13, 2017: The Dielianhua cherry-blossom tour group rolled over on National Freeway No. 5, killing 33. Driver Kang Yu-hsun had been at work from 4:30 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., logging over 16 consecutive hours. He had also had his license suspended for drunk driving earlier that year, yet the company still scheduled him for duty².

March 20, 2024: In Kaohsiung's Renwu District, a tour bus descending from Alishan struck a culvert. Driver Deng had already been on duty for 15 hours that day²⁴.

April 28, 2025: On the Wuyang Elevated section of National Freeway No. 1 in Taoyuan, a tour bus's engine began smoking and caught fire while in motion. The driver pulled over to the shoulder and evacuated 24 passengers. The vehicle was engulfed in flames moments later. The driver suffered smoke burns to his eyes, and two passengers sustained minor injuries²⁵ — the brevity of the escape window and the speed of the fire once again confirmed that the lessons of the 2016 National Freeway No. 2 fire had never truly been absorbed by the industry.

After every accident, the authorities announce a "comprehensive review," but the next disaster always arrives on schedule within a few years. The accident section of this article takes up only one-seventh of the text, but these incidents are in fact the most direct thermometer of the industry's structural disease.

11 Hours, Clocking In, Facial Recognition: The New System Effective January 1, 2026

The most important legislative progress after Dielianhua came in 2022: the MOTC amended Article 86-4 of the Automobile Transport Industry Management Rules, stipulating that a tour bus driver's time from check-in to end of work must not exceed 11 hours, and continuous driving must not exceed 4 hours, with a maximum fine of NT$90,000 for violations⁴.

But the enforcement loophole is obvious: tachographs record the "vehicle," not the "person." One bus could be driven uphill by Driver A and downhill by Driver B — calculated separately, neither exceeds the limit — and as long as the authorities cannot prove the same person was driving, the penalty is effectively meaningless.

Hence the new system effective January 1, 2026: on April 27, 2025, the MOTC issued amendments to the Automobile Transport Industry Management Rules, mandating that all approximately 14,000 tour buses nationwide be equipped with "driver identification devices." Drivers must clock in using an employee card, IC card, or facial recognition before starting work, linked to the tachograph and GPS, so that the authorities can precisely track "who drove for how long"⁵. A May 2025 analysis report by the Legislative Yuan's Legal Affairs Bureau also noted that this system closes the "vehicle-person separation" enforcement gap that had persisted since 2017²⁶.

But the new system is not without controversy: the Highway Bureau subsidizes a maximum of NT$2,000 per vehicle, while a full installation (card reader, sensors, backend system) costs between NT$3,000 and NT$10,000, with the difference absorbed by operators. Labor unions protested that drivers were being asked to bear the cost themselves²⁷. Travel agencies must also adjust itineraries to avoid rushing, but under the low-tour-fee structure, enforcement ultimately depends on inspection capacity rather than industry self-regulation. Long-standing passenger-side issues — such as failure to wear seatbelts and defective emergency exit designs — were also not addressed in this round of regulatory reform.

The Industry by the Numbers: 14,000 Vehicles, 900 Operators, and Structural Contraction

According to the most recent Tour Bus Operations Survey by the MOTC's Department of Statistics, as of the end of 2021, the Taiwan-Fujian region still had 907 tour bus operators and approximately 14,000 tour buses in service²⁸. Compared with 944 operators and 16,830 vehicles at the end of 2015²⁹, both the number of operators and the number of vehicles have declined — a loss of nearly 3,000 vehicles in six years. Three forces are squeezing simultaneously:

• The high-speed rail eating into the domestic tourism market: After the THSR opened in 2007, long-distance group travel demand along the western corridor structurally declined, and charter services shifted from "point-to-point transport" to "intra-destination shuttle."
• The rise of independent travel: Younger generations prefer small groups, self-driving, and hotel-booking apps, concentrating whole-vehicle charter demand at the upper end.
• The COVID-19 shock: From 2020 to 2022, group travel was virtually suspended. Some operators went bankrupt; some vehicles were scrapped and not replaced. New vehicle registrations had not returned to pre-pandemic levels as of 2025.

But the pressure of aging fleets has only intensified. Tour buses may legally remain in service for 15 years (Class A large passenger vehicles), but under low-margin market pressure, many operators run their vehicles to the limit. The vehicle involved in the 2017 Dielianhua crash was manufactured in 2009 and had been in service for 8 years; the way the vehicle broke apart at high speed also made "structural integrity" a key point of post-accident review.

The industry simultaneously faces three unresolved transition challenges: electric bus adoption under green-energy policy is progressing slowly, with operators waiting on subsidies; driver aging and labor shortages make the cost of dual-driver crews prohibitive, complicating long-haul scheduling under the 2026 new system; and fragmented transition strategies — a few operators have pivoted to airport transfers, corporate shuttles, science park commuter buses, or scenic-area tour shuttles (such as at Xilingxi or Jiouzutang), but a "retreat-style" transition has not yet become an industry consensus.

A Comparative Perspective: What Europe Achieves, and Why Taiwan Cannot

The European Union has very strict dedicated legislation on long-distance bus driver working hours (EC 561/2006): a daily driving limit of 9 hours (extendable to 10 hours twice per week), a mandatory 45-minute break after 4.5 hours of continuous driving, mandatory dual-driver crews on long-haul routes, and real-time enforcement through digital tachographs on all vehicles. Taiwan's 2022 11-hour cap and 2026 driver identification devices are steps in the right direction but remain considerably more lenient, and dual-driver crews are not mandatory.

The Control Yuan has issued multiple corrections against the MOTC over tour bus accidents in the past decade, but reforms have consistently been "treating the headache and ignoring the head": GPS, penalties, evaluations, and identification devices have been added wave after wave, but the core of the affiliation system and low-price competition has never been cracked. Possible fundamental solutions — mandating higher market floor prices (legally mandated minimums from travel agencies to operators to drivers), raising mandatory liability insurance caps, accelerating scrappage subsidies, and gradually restricting or comprehensively regulating the affiliation system — are discussed after every accident, then shelved once public attention fades.

Consumers are not bystanders either. The Highway Bureau publishes annual safety evaluation ratings for tour bus operators (Grades A, B, and C), and from 2026 onward, charter customers are encouraged to proactively ask about driver working-hour regulations⁵. But the low-price tour model — sustained by shopping-stop commissions — still has its market, and in the era of independent travel, some consumers also prefer "cheap whole-vehicle charters" — as long as demand-side price sensitivity does not change, there will always be someone on the supply side willing to take the risk.

How Can This Keep Going?

After Dielianhua, the MOTC promoted the "Tour Bus Safety Management Evaluation," amended the rules to cap working hours at 11 hours, and mandated driver identification devices effective 2026. But the root problems — the affiliation system and low-tour-fee competition — remain unresolved.

This iron box that has carried Taiwanese people over mountains and seas for sixty years — from the Japanese colonial era's "jidōsha," through the chaos of postwar reception, through the elegance of the Golden Horse Misses flipping teacups with one hand, through the long coexistence of wild chicken buses and the affiliation system, through the 33 lives lost at Dielianhua — its story is in fact the story of how Taiwan's postwar "populist tourism dividend of cheapness" was devoured by industrial structure.

The next accident is indeed "only a matter of time," unless the entire ecosystem (supply, demand, and regulation) is rebalanced. What is needed is not just more GPS units and card readers, but a wholesale renegotiation of the industry: travel agencies willing to offer reasonable tour fees, operators willing to pay drivers reasonable wages, consumers willing to pay a little more for safety, and regulators willing to deal with the deeply buried bomb that is the affiliation system.

Otherwise, the next tour bus to fall off an interchange or burn into a fireball on the Wuyang Elevated Road is always on its way.

Further Reading: Golden Horse Misses, tshia-tsiáng-á (bus conductors), United Highway Bus (Ubus), Aloha Bus, National Freeway No. 5, Taiwan's tourism industry, Labor Standards Act, Automobile Transport Industry Management Rules

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