A trade delegation just got back from opening a West Virginia Trade Office in Taiwan. The office will serve as a hub for promoting the state as a prime location for Taiwanese investment and assisting West Virginia businesses with exporting their products and services to Taiwan.
One delegation member, however, said he learned much more than increasing global markets.
Del. Daniel Linville, R-Cabell, chairs the House Committee on Technology and Infrastructure. He said he is already back in touch with the Taiwan Foreign Ministry after viewing ways to improve West Virginia’s infrastructure challenges.
Linville said the mountainous island nation had an incredible number of high-end road and rail tunnels.
“They’re a very mountainous country, like our state,” Linville said. ”Certainly they build roads over and above their mountains and those sorts of things. But both for rail service, and for traditional vehicle service, they had an incredible number of tunnels and seem to have really mastered that art.”
Linville also said broadband and cell service was everywhere in Taiwan, strong even in the most remote areas.
“Folks were able to take pictures and share them with friends and those sorts of things,” Linville said. “You could tell that all the people were connected. It didn’t matter if someone had an AT&T phone or a Verizon phone or something like that. We all had service while we were over there just about everywhere. So how is it that they were able to accomplish that?”
Linville said he believes Taiwan’s technology on tunnel building and broadband connectivity is adaptable to the Mountain State, and he is working on that adaptation.