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Trick question! The answer is never ever cross the road.
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The same thing almost happened to me two days ago. I was walking on the sidewalk and was aware that there was a bus waiting to make a left turn. I thought the bus driver would know I was there, as there should have been no obstruction to prevent them from seeing me. As I was entering the lane, they turned very quickly toward me. I took off running to avoid being hit… I am not sure if the bus driver was only paying attention to the traffic to my right so they could make the turn and not checking to see if there were pedestrians, or they were trying to intimidate me…
This is the intersection (I was walking toward Costco):
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It’s pretty sad how realistic this is… Especially the whole raise your hand thing which really was a thing being pushed by a politician as a solution…
They have another good one here.that I saw a few days ago too.
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Never trust any of the drivers, even if they look you straight in the eyes, half the time they literally do not see you.
Edit: Even if they do see you they probably don’t care anyways, you are a peasant, a measly pedestrian, car is king in Taiwan.
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Another great “sidewalk” design in Taichung. The design makes it look like it was purposely made for Taiwanese drivers to kill/maim as many pedestrians as possible given the poor driving and situational/spatial awareness skills.
Also another pedestrian hit at a crossing in Changhua. Driver only looked at oncoming traffic and drove straight into the pedestrian…
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He was one metre away from the zebra crossing. I hope the Mercedes driver gets a nice compensation.
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This is the same problem as always:
Both not looking.
The old lady also never looking right or left.
Starting in March Keelung police will start enter a period of strict law enforcement at major intersections to create a more pedestrian friendly environment. To let elders and children safely cross the road (why not everyone…). I didn’t see any mention anything about engineering/design or education changes.
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There’s probably a shortage of people they can use to fix it because they need 10+ people to fix a 2 meter section of street. 9 people stand around and one does everything.
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Why is it her responsibility to look? She was clearly already in the middle of the crosswalk, the driver should be yielding to her at that point.
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Just walked by the new Lalapot outlet near Taichung downtown, same place where hundreds of people got issued tickets for illegally parking their scooters on the sidewalk. Turns out there’s a bunch of on sidewalk parking with the painted lines. Brand new development, wide open area, tons of space, and they still do it all wrong. On one corner there were tons of traffic cones for some reason so pedestrians were getting funneled in a line…while trying to pass by scooters who were coming in to park or leaving, some of them being the volunteer crossing guards…
Beyond hopeless…can we bring back the Japanese govt…at least to handle all transportation related matters.
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Wow, that’s cool. I’m going to upload some stuff!
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But it looks like some of the pics are of cars/scooters parking on the side not of poorly designed/dangerous sidewalks which is a different issue.
If mods allow me, I’m going to self-reference/promote my other post.
We made a small web game for a Taiwanese indie band that features the streets of Taiwan (Taipei) and features the protagonist walking through them.
It includes walkway-driving scooters
Green-path parked vehicles
And black window-tinted cars not yielding to pedestrians at crosswalks
You can play it for free from your browser (works on mobile phones too!) at the link in the post.
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Are you going to integrate the map above to make certain areas worse than others?
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I know that area very well having the (mis)fortune to live nearby for a while.
Well there is a very sad story behind those green painted pedestrian lines. A few years ago a student from TongAn Elementary School.was run over a bus and killed walking home on that road.
Their answer was to paint those green ‘pedestrian areas’ on that road.
Parts of Taoyuan were badly designed and this road is a busy road with a popular market on it, but they can and must do better.
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Delivery truck in Zhonghe slows to stop and let pedestrians cross at a crosswalk, next to a MRT station. Police vehicle coming up from behind immediately blares it’s siren twice. Police later responded that due to the size of the vehicle they didn’t see the pedestrians, but CCTV footage show the police car was far enough back to have a clear view of the pedestrians waiting to cross.
Another video shows a car stopping for a student to cross the street. Car behind immediately honks at him. A car 2 cars behind crosses a double yellow to go around both cars and comes close to the student crossing on the crosswalk.
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It cannot be more Taiwan than those two videos.
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