[quote=“Elegua”]Of course they do. You must give me the right of way.
Stoopid foreigners.[/quote]
Exactly!
(I would +1 rep you however the button seems to have disppeared, what happened to that?)
This is Taiwan and Chinese culture in general.
you see it also in the elevator/doorway/MRT, I’ll stand and block you syndrome because I don’t care or I’m not aware. dumber than sheep, at least sheep don’t run into each other (afaik). Kinda ironic considering how much into “harmony” or “order” Chinese culture seems to be… because deep down, they love chaos because they are selfish, or ignorantly unintentionally selfish.
That’s a non-argument, often deployed to justify pisspoor behaviour. It’s always possible to find some country worse than yours and point out how awful they are. China does this all the time (“never mind our pollution … look at those awful Americans!”). The statement itself may be true, but it says nothing about whether the behaviour in question should be/can be improved. We’re not talking about queue-jumping in 7-11 here. Failing to yield when the law says you should (or rather, when other drivers expect that you should) results in death, injury, and economic waste. That’s kinda important.
American accident statistics are actually quite depressing. Simply being American hasn’t made them good drivers, surprisingly enough. Try comparing with the UK, which has one of the lowest accident rates on the planet. They’ve probably reached the lower theoretical limit allowed by the road/car system.
Funnily enough, I’ve also noticed that some of the so-called backward places (I’m thinking east coast) do have better driving habits.
Yes. Absolutely. This is NOT a “cultural issue”. It’s about safety. You can see the same attitude in factories, where a lot of bosses still refuse to install basic safety equipment or drill the workers on safety procedures. These are simply methods to ensure that human fallibility doesn’t have tragic results. We know they work. Taiwanese people can see that they work. Not only do they work, they don’t cost anything (or very little). If 5000 years of Chinese history still hasn’t produced anything better, then maybe our barbarian methods might help them survive the next 5000 without too much collateral damage on the roads.
OTOH I don’t believe it’s selfishness, as such. All humans are selfish. It’s probably a good example of a ‘meme’ - a purely intellectual idea that takes a while to take root, but endures beyond human lifespans.
My personal observations about American fatal accidents (and many close-calls) is they are caused mainly by 2 things:
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High speed (mixed with recklessness)
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Alcohol
Other places have highway speeds don’t get nearly as high as US highways (where people drive 100mph) and so accidents tend not to be fatal. Sure, in some places like Germany, there seems to be high speed too (and drinking), but I attribute the difference to reckless driving.
You think too much, I’m sure it is completely safe. By the way, you don’t live in Luzhou right??
When I’ve encountered problems caused by other drivers out in the boonies (e.g. the driver who drove into the ditch at Beidawushan, and the guy who damaged the back door of the car I was driving in Nan-ao), they turned out to be from Taipei.
Still, within Taipei, I find driving to be relatively orderly (outside of peak rush hour); it’s worse in Taipei County and the larger cities down south.
Try imagining what would happen, all of a sudden, if sailing was deregulated in Taiwan and everyone went out and bought a sailing boat. Or try imagining Taiwan allowing, god forbid, private aviation, where everyone went out and bought a private Cessna.
Right. There is your answer.
Fuck, they should call it wrong of way here.
Yes, it’s called 往哦喂!
What gets me the most are the old ladies playing chicken on the sidewalk. I’m honestly surprised that there aren’t more stories on the news here about some overgrown laowai plowing right over Ah Ma.
Now that would give a whole new meaning to “it’s raining men” …
So, of course I insinuated that I disagree that Taiwanese people cannot grasp the concept of right of way. However, I believe that they do.
If you insert a Taiwanese driver into country x - a country that has a high standard of driving safety, then the Taiwanese driver will behave and drive according to the rules and the system in that country immediately. I don’t think right of way is a concept that needs to be learned - I think it just comes down to common sense and respect for the right of other people. Unfortunately, in Taiwan, we witness a group culture that has little respect for either personal space, rule of law or right of way, and everybody acts accordingly. In Taiwan, people know they can get away with breaking the law or not giving right of way because the system here allows them to get away with it over 95% of the time.
It therefore comes down to pure selfishness and a lack of respect, a group culture and lack of adequate enforcement.
The support what I have written above, I once had an argument with some trollop who did an unexpected left turn in front of me. When I skidded to a halt the idiot scowled at me and then flipped me off. Now, I wasn’t going to react to his driving, but I’m not going to be forced to take evasive action and the put up with some jerk giving me the finger, so I got out of the car.
And so did he.
So he started flipping off and shouting about how foreigners don’t respect the driving way in Taiwan - yeah, this is Taiwan…and generally performed like a buffoon on the street - all in Chinese. After trying to calm him down and telling him I really don’t relish being flipped off, he came round and revealed that he is on a visit from LA - he was a naturalized citizen of the US and had been for about 20 years.
He then apoligized and that was that.
I often feel like ramming into people who do that, but self-preservation takes over. It’s the almost total lack of a sense of self-preservation that is so prevalent here that I just don’t understand.
I saw an accident in front of MacKay hospital just the other week. Kid on a moped who’d been rammed into by a taxi at the change of the light. It’s very possible he was dead, given his motionless state, cracked face, and the paramedics just sauntering into the intersection to retrieve him. I felt really upset about it for a whole block where I witnessed another two idiots (also taxi and moped) miss each other by literally an inch as the lights changed on Linsen N. Road (and the moped rider remained blissfully unaware of his brush with death) and then I realized that half the people hospitalized here probably deserve it. Like the drunken motorcyclist with a broken neck I’d seen inside MacKay that night who was telling everyone who’d listen how thrilled he was with his life, with the nurses and with the utter lack of sensation from the neck down.
i dont miss the mayhem on the streets on the wan.
Me too. I remember, in my early days in Taiwan, talking to a girl at our factory. We were waiting for one of the managers, who going to drive us somewhere for lunch. “He’s a very good driver,” she says, “he can drive very fast”.
I simply couldn’t think of an appropriate reply.
Sadly, the other 50% don’t. Still, it would be fun to write a Swiftian “modest proposal” to the local rag, on the lines that traffic laws should be abolished entirely on the grounds that it will improve Taiwan’s gene pool. Any satire-writers hang out here?
I just keep walking. If people bump into me, that’s their problem. I guess I’ve become Taiwanese in that respect. I used to be very English about it, but I gave up. I can’t change the system. Now I may offer a “pie say” (Taiwanese for “sorry”) if I’ve been at fault, i.e. bumped into someone …but the streets here are a fucking jungle! Driving must be ten times worse!
Well it is not ‘right of way’, but it is common sense I think.
Right on a red light should be legal, if you stop and look and then go, but that is for a different argument.
Typical story I hear is foreigner comes here, gets a scooter, and some jerk turns into the street (street the foreigner is on, going forward) from an off road and ‘wack’ the foreigner is not working for a month, and has learned that nobody stops at an intersection or cross road. Heck at least I slow down and make sure it is clear.
So the ‘right of way’ is something that will never be learned or obeyed here. I asked my girlfriend, her parents, employment, co-workers about it and they all claim ‘culture’, and that it is just their ‘culture’. Great that is fine, it is their culture, but when you have one of the highest deaths per motorist in the world, you might want to change your ‘culture’ a bit.
Stupidity is not cultural.
Chinese people are lacking in logic ability. There. I said it. Trying to figure out the correct right-of-way requires logic.
My kids here in Beijing spent at least 5 minutes figuring out how to fit a large table through a doorway yesterday, insisting that just pushing it through would work. When a computer doesn’t work, bang on it. That will fix it. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable for me to park my car in front of 7/11 blocking a lane of traffic. Yes, it’s fine to stand in the doorway of the bus when other people are trying to get off. Chinese people lack awareness of other people, and lack the logical ability to solve puzzles in their mind quickly. They 100% lack the ability to rationalize things. We can see the result of this inability in:
- (Lack of) Right-of-way
- Business mismanagement
- Lack of ability to delegate in the workplace (as in ‘just do whatever needs to be done’ type of attitude)
- NO EFFICIENCY IN ANYTHING
…there’s a lot more but I don’t feel like sitting here for 2 hours making a list. You guys get the point.
Right-of-way is a concept that does not exist. It’s not whether or not they understand the concept, it’s that they aren’t even aware it exists.
I feel bad that I’ve arrived at this ‘western superiority’ type of attitude, but hey, China got the shit kicked out of it for its 20,000 years of history for a reason, and I’ve been here long enough to stop being naive.
Ergo, they must be horrible in math. 