This isn’t really an issue in Taiwan since our green man lights up at the same time as the 90-second green lights for vehicles at most crossings, unlike the UK.
Although this presents another issue of making turning vehicles and pedestrians go on the road at the same time.
Pick your battles, I guess.
Is an issue in all the streets where is not shared with the cars. Old people can’t make it.
They have changed a lot of the lights in Kaohsiung such that pedestrians get a ten second head start.
There are some pretty long crossings with only 20 seconds down here, some slow movers can’t make it but they are an exception. Drivers should he able to see that happening and just wait on those rare occasions. But.
A 10-second head-start in addition to the 90-second (or whatever) green man? That’s pretty good.
I’m pretty sure they didn’t change the green man time, whatever that is, and just delay the cars by 10 seconds
Ah ok, so now cars get 10 seconds less green light per cycle. They can handle it.
Pedestrian in Taipei is hit while crossing the street, driver flees the scene making it a hit and run. In the video it can be seen that the vehicle approached the pedestrian crossing without slowing down, after hitting the pedestrian the vehicle hits the brakes for a second then immediately flees the scene.
Bus stop in Taichung with no bus shelter/cover. Exposed in the hot sun at a stop used mostly by elderly and school children as it’s next to a middle school. There is a bench, however, because it sits in the sun all day it becomes very hot so people don’t sit on it and have to stand and wait for the bus in the sun. There is a sidewalk, but it has a height difference with the road of almost 1m according to the news. It is also mostly blocked off on purpose because people are worried about students falling off.
So to safely wait for the bus you should be on the sidewalk and according to the law you should be on the sidewalk when there is one or risk getting fined. But the sidewalk is elevated way too far above the road and purposefully blocked off to “protect” the kids from falling off. What this ends up doing is forcing people to jump off to get to the bus stop or illegally walking along the road from up or down the road to get to the bus stop area.
A complete failure of design that puts passengers at risk. Also for those getting off at this stop it means it’s also difficult or impossible to get onto the sidewalk which means they must illegally walk next to the road instead of using the sidewalk.
Taxi driver is mad at scooter who stops for pedestrian. Immediately starts honking at her. At the red light he just goes on a nonsensical rant.
Actually had a taxi driver the other day get fucking furious at a lady standing near the driveway of a hospital looking like she was waiting for someone. Went on a rant on how pedestrians get hit on purpose…there was 6 meters to the side to pass her just fine but he purposely drove closer to her. Also this driver kept swerving in between traffic and slamming on the accelerator despite being told multiple times to drive slow as I was taking an elderly acquaintance to the hospital…
I saw a dog trying to cross the road when the green man light was on and no cars were stopping for it. The dog almost got hit a few times but jumped out of the way. Felt bad for it. The trucks were purposely not stopping for it or trying to drive around it.
The scooter didn’t even brake that suddenly as the taxi driver claimed.
It should have waited for the green dog light.
You need to drive at a speed that allows you to stop or evade any obstacles. So you need to slow down if a vehicle is blocking your view of a pedestrian crossing (where they have right of way).
You would do this without thinking if it was a rail crossing. You don’t want to be hit by a train. You also don’t want to be that train for a pedestrian. Drive safe.
Never underestimate stupidity.
I think this is also from the Kaohsiung Pedestrian rights and safety protest.
Scooters are illegally parked on the sidewalk. A bystander or the scooter owner gets mad and says “How am I supposed to park, how is everyone supposed to do business? Taiwan is small!” Meanwhile the pedestrians are forced to walk in the road even though there is a sidewalk because of the illegally parked vehicles.
EDIT: Seems the video was taken down
It’s not uncommon to hear about police departments being put under a lot of pressure to reduce crime and accidents. When that doesn’t happen, heads roll so one way to prevent that from happening is to fudge the numbers and I have a strong suspicion that for a long time, Taiwanese police departments (who ever is/was in charge of reducing some of these numbers) were doing just that. That way everyone was happy, promotions went through and nobody lost face. Now, with all the attention on the accidents it’s harder for them to get away with it.
When I was in the military one of the major jobs of the bookkeepers is to fudge the numbers and cook the books. Except they knew how to cook the books so that nobody up there cared. Stuff like mandatory training, exercise, etc. were fudged because there was no time to do them, or they just sent a couple of soldiers to do them to say they’ve done it.
Problem is the actual requirement is too strict and there was not enough personnel or the time to do all of them, so you had to cook the books if you wanted to survive at all.
Like in basic everyone graduated, and only the best performing squad ever got actual PT test, and the results were all fudged. Nobody ever recycled.
It wouldn’t be Taiwan if they didn’t install at least one bus stop that was blocking the sidewalk.
I don’t see the problem here. Where else should the bus stop be? There’s plenty of space behind it.