Doe anyone know why they draw up to red lights, cross the white line, stop for about 80% of the time the light is red, and then move off through the red light 10 seconds or so before it turns green ? What is the point of stopping if you’re going to run the red light anyway ?
Why does the oblivious old woman ride her scooter out in front of me as I’m stopped at the white line waiting for the light to go green ? She then pootles off some ten seconds before the light goes green at a snail’s pace and I pass her within seconds of the light going green ?
She makes up no time. She does not get to her destination faster. She breaks the law (well who cares?). She gets passed by twenty or thirty vehicles screaming past her. That’s gotta be unpleasant. So what does it benefit her to crawl up to the front of the queue, stop for a random amount of time, and then run the red light ? Nothing - except for increasing her chances of getting squashed by one of the chaps below:
My current favourite are the ones who pull up at the red light just as it’s going red, and then scream off through it just as the green-lighters are coming through.
It was all much safer ten years ago when no-one paid a blind bit of notice to traffic laws. This selective obedience is very confusing…!
[quote=“hexuan”]
It was all much safer ten years ago when no-one paid a blind bit of notice to traffic laws. This selective obedience is very confusing…![/quote]
Especially when they go and change the rules on a daily basis without any notice.
Hope Mrs. Fluffy is okay by now. But there isn’t much you can do or change about Taiwanese Driver’s attitude and habits. All we can do is becareful and deal with it…
It’s a problem that can be rectified easily enough by education … unfortunately, the powers-that-be here have their heads so far up their asses that it’ll be a cold day in hell before any realizes that there are actually serious issues that need to be addressed for Taiwan to continue to advance.
I think the important point is to learn how to live with it. They aren’t going to change for us and resent having our high handed manners thrown in their face. Fixing a problem requires noticing that there is one and then deciding to actually do something to fix it, i.e. like when A-bian as Taipei mayor stuck the cops on the street to direct traffic to try and control a miserable situation. The problems are deep and when you have one political party pretty much bent on selling the place to China, then you aren’t going to get a lot of solutions. Which means us long termers, short termers, and permanent residents have got to learn how to deal with the problems using successful strategies that can be copied by the Chinese cultural neophytes.
Whining isn’t going to fix the problem. Shaming them only brings partial change, resentment and immigration to our countries(which isn’t bad). Spreading useful strategies to common problems is the point of websites like this and should be our goal to catalogue them.