3,000 Traffic Deaths a Year in Taiwan/3900 in Japan

Traffic Minister blames it on drunk driving and the need for tighter controls on drivers’ licenses.

Taiwan’s population is roughly 23,000,000.

According to this article Japan had 3900 traffic deaths last year. Population of Japan is roughly 126,000,000.

Taiwan’s rate is very high indeed. 3000/annum seems to be dropping slightly as it has been for so long about 10/day. Multiply by 365 that makes 3650 a year, plus/minus. A LOT of tragedy.

Let’s face it locals here have terrible driving skills and for some reason their key driving strategy is to always accelerate into gaps and to randomly change lanes with a micro-second of indication, if at all. But yeah, I guess its the drunk driving causes most of the deaths.

Let’s face it. Most people in this country still rely on motorbikes to get around, which will always be more dangerous than driving a car.

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Taiwanese believe that being skillful makes you a good driver and not leaving a enough breaking distance of the car in front of you, driving defensively and taking into account “if I just speed out of this side street I could get hit, so lets slow down to a halt and make sure it’s safe before I enter the main road” like the rest of us believe when it comes to being a good driver.

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???

Guy

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What would you like clarity on?

Thanks for asking.

I have no idea what your quotation is referring to.

Cheers,
Guy

Refers to deaths because they try to drive skillfully and not defensively. If they speed out of a side street they believe with enough skill you will avoid an oncoming car, where Westerners believe that slowing down, checking if it is clear then moving on is the best approach.

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That is true, they always tend to speed when in danger instead of slowing down.

A little context:

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That Philippine number looks weird (as in unbelievable)

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It there any difference in how the Philippines reports deaths? Like not counting people who die in a hospital after the accident (as opposed to at the scene) or not counting someone walking who was run over. Or maybe official traffic reports are not always filed in the Philippines?

Maybe. The sources for the data are apparently international sources, and these, of course, could be subject to inaccuracies from the country. I figure there is a lot that is simply not reported.

When I clicked the “Country data” link, I saw a long list of (again) international and US based sources.


Here is a story from a recent Philippine source, and this calculates 2006 traffic deaths in the Philippines at 6.6 / 100,000 - so, it’s still much lower than Taiwan, but not as crazy sounding as 1.1

The Philippines probably has a lot less traffic.

And those figures are already much better than I expected. I was under the impression that the road fatality rate was like 5 times higher here.

The Philippines probably has a lot less traffic.

Not trying to start anything, but that sentence sounds very funny to me. Actually, it should be “Manila probably has …” for it to sound absurd to those of us who regularly endure it :slight_smile:

At the same time, the Philippines must have much more traffic (cars) than Taiwan. Sure, it has a tiny middle class by comparison, but there are A LOT of cars there. And there are more getting on the roads (I saw that somewhere but don’t have a link now)

That the Philippines would have less (half!) the rate of traffic accidents than Taiwan is shocking to me.

Of course the amount of cars would have an impact. How will you explain the high traffic related death rate in America then?

well the traffic minister sounds like a clueless boob, which is pretty sad.

The USA has more cars on the road per capita than Korea and Taiwan. In Korea and Taiwan, there is the option for mrt, bus, and train. So you would think less cars per captia would reduce the rate, but it doesn’t. That means a higher percentage of vehicles in Taiwan and korea are involved in accidents.

It’s got to be a thankless job in any case. Almost as bad as being named premier. You just can’t win.

IF they could get stats for deaths per people/mile. IN other words, not just per capita but also counting miles travelled.

And also they should be compared by population density. IN other words, a city of five million people in the USA versus China, versus Thailand, etc.

AS they say, lies and statistics go hand in hand as you can tailor any result you want depending on how you look at things.

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