Big Carrefour
https://goo.gl/maps/59QB8Lij98t
Not great Dos Tacos
https://goo.gl/maps/xZCJqWzaHZu
Who was the one who recommended Hualien?
āHualien Rocksā
Rocks and Shakes apparently.
Sad so see loss of life there. Could have been worse. Looks like there are still some older buildings that are not quake proof.
Hualien is a pleasant surprise, in that it actually is a nice place
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Definitely east. Taitung is definitely countryside, but the overal attitude about environment is quite different on the east than the west, in a better way. Culturally its still pretty messed up in that old traditional way, but if you donāt have family there yours all good. I left the south west for the east last year. Closed my.businesses, sold my land, closed up and left. Couldnāt handle it there anymore, east coast is so much nicer in everyway with exception of convenience and city related infrastructure. If buying things easier or transportation/manufacturing convenience isnāt a big priority, move out here for your health.
Maintaining and pingtung are insanely bad, especially when the rains stop and donāt wash some.of the pollution away.
I suppose you mean āKaohsiung and Pingtungā?
Agree on Taitung. Clean, fresh living. Less earthquakes, but maybe more chance of direct typhoon hit, but that can easily be rectified depending on where you live, the direction your abode faces, and how big your windows are, ha.
The electrification of the Hualien-Taitung rail line has made traveling in/out much better. Gone are the days that it took 6+ hours by čŖå¼·č to get to Taitung from Tpe main station. Like 3.5hrs now.
Ya kaohsiung haha. Phones will never replace computersā¦
Take 3.5ish 2.5 to kaohsiung. Plus southern railway and highway are being redone so traffic should.be less congested. Might be the beginning of the end there though haha.
Its a no brainer that the West coast/Taipei, being directly downwind from Mainland China based on jetstream/weather air mass patterns at that latitude, is constantly bathed by the mainlandās dust and industrial pollution. In the east coast the mountains tend to block most of that dust and pollution. Another issue is that most of the population in West coast and Taipei tend to live in Valleys which also traps pollution.
I think its ok to say that Taiwan creates itās own fair share of air pollution, especially on the west coast.
Estimated to be 65% from Taiwan at least.
Than I guess this still means 35-40% from mainland which is still significant. I heard people testify about dust storms in the west coast in the recent years. It was unimaginable at first how that can occur in Taiwan? As it used to be just an mainland phenomena. Therefore it must had been blown in from the mainland due to a strong air current, its inevitable that air pollution from China would accompany that dust. And that the valleys of the west coast and Taipei as well as the mountains would collect the dust just like any household furniture that faces an open window or being windward.
I notice that air quality has worsened quite a bit in the 2010s compared to the 2000s. Its sad that its heading backwards after all those years of EPA air quality efforts in Taiwan that significantly improved things from how they were in the 1970s and 1980s before strict emission controls were introduced for motorcycles/scooters and incinerators/industry. And when most industrial manufacturing economic power were in Taiwan and not mainland China as they are today.
Taiwan has always had dust storms due to the Riverside gravel drying out after flooding and typhoons.
Records go back centuries.
Iām sure there were sandstorms from China over the centuries too.
Of course the China brown cloud is something that got really bad over the last few years. It definitely worsened. But when I lived in Taichung it also got worse year by year and most of that was local emissions from the factories, powerplants and bigger population meaning more vehicle pollution.
Scooter emissions are not so strictly controlled. Less soot now but still high in NOx and SOx and O3.
Main problem is there are still way too many vehicles and scooter numbers are not dropping in particular.
My nickname for.Taiwan isā fossil fuel islandā or even more aptly ā carbon islandā If it burns they burn it. Thatās INCREDIBLY backwards as we already experience rapid climate change here and know that air pollution literally could cook our future generations but thatās they way it is right nowā¦
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It certainly hasnāt gotten worse. Hereās the proof:
PM 2.5 in Taichung, 2011 (red and purple account for 38% of the year)
PM 2.5 in Taichung, 2017 (red and purple account for 13% of the year)
Itās still not good per se, but it used to be far, far worse. I lived in Taichung from 2009 to 2012, and I have definitely noticed the difference when I visit it now. The reason why people keep saying āitās been getting worseā is that the issue of air quality was first brough up fairly recently (since like 2013 or something), so now people are far more aware of the difference between a good day and a bad day.
Anyway, the city with the cleanest air is definitely Taipei. These past couple of days havenāt been good but 90% of the time itās tolerable/good, at least visibly. Hualien is a village. Itās not even a town.
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When I lived there it worsened year by year that was just a few years ago. As for very recently , Iād need to double check because I do not trust Taichung city government with collecting these kind of stats. Central governmentā¦ā¦still need to double check.
Remember Taichung became a city that includes the central mountains now after the zoning changes.
Where are you getting those pics from with the pollution stats?
Also why choose two years like that Iād like to see every year for the last ten years for example?
Even local prof say they are gaming the numbers.
http://m.nchu.edu.tw/en-news-detail/id/183
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If OP can live anywhere in Taiwan, would that include Lanyu?
Taipei air is crap by all international standards. It is not āfineā.
How bad is pollution in Taiwan? by @ThomasTalhelm
https://www.quora.com/How-bad-is-pollution-in-Taiwan/answer/Thomas-Talhelm?share=752f2cd3&srid=x5Zj
Its just better than the other cities on the west coast mainly cos of rain and the factories and refniries being down south.
Incidentally you can also see how ridiculous it is to average out air pollution stats across āmetro areasā in Taiwan, in Taipeiās case you are including parts of mountain ranges such as Yangmingshan ! In this case the stats were for greater Taipei but you can see how easily stats can be manipulated by including different definitions of city and metro area etc in Taiwan.
A MUCH BETTER way to analyse would be to estimate on āreal pollution impact per individualā where the pop density is taken into account in a given district Not some bullshit averaged down figure.
https://qph.ec.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-67adfb60f8f4529d9da5b449608aa444
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That was the data from a exact same 5 stations in Taichung so no itās not because of the zoning changes, and they are from the central government. Someone checked all the statistics and made the chart.
https://taqm.epa.gov.tw/taqm/tw/YearlyDataDownload.aspx
And hereās a gif of the trend of 7 years. From 2011 to 2017.
For me itās fine most of the time and itās certainyl better than something like 95% of Asia, with the 5% being Japanese cities. When itās not raining/overcast I see clear sky the majority of the time. I know that the West is much better, which is a given, like seriously what do you expect? And mind you, with things like air pollution, one bad day is often enough to leave people with the impression that itās always bad.
Maybe the statistics are indeed manipulated, I wouldnāt know, but according to my eyes and my nostril, it was much worse a few years ago in Taichung, itās not even close, and the statistics reflect that. The difference, like I said, is that nobody knew that it was air pollution, until a few years ago. You can ask yourself if youād heard anyone talking about this air quality issue before 2012 - 2013 in Taiwan, for me the answer to that would be no.
I lived in Taichung for years during that period and for me I discerned the visible pollution as worsening over that time. Of course we need to look at the data to make a judgement. 2011 was obviously the worst year in that series so it looks like it wasnt chosen randomly but to make a point.
What I do know for certain is the pollution levels in Taichung and in Nantou and down to the South of Taiwan shocked me.
Taipei is relatively clean compared to some cities Iām Asia especially Chinese cities. China and real messes like Bangkok and Jakarta are not what we should be comparing to. We should be comparing ourselves with Japan I think.
I donāt agree that the west being cleaner is a given . When I was growing up not that long ago, we had terrible air pollution in winter from burning coal in the cities to heat our homes. One year it was banned and people had to look for alternatives such as natural gas, the skies cleaned up almost overnight in the big cities. There was a LOT of moaning and grumbling about how expensive the other options were compared to coal but soon people.realised the new policy made sense.
But itās not a question of comparison but more of low hanging fruit , it would be relatively simple to improve Taipeiās air quality further by cutting down motor scooter numbers and banning on street burning of ghost money, for instance. At the moment almost every policy in Taiwan seems to be talking about waiting until 2030 to be enacted.
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Yes, please.
Guy
A study that links pollution to unethical behavior 
Polluted Morality: Air Pollution Predicts Criminal Activity and Unethical Behavior
Realy great: The Salt Lick