I hate them.
Their gasoline combustion is so terribly incomplete that it makes us become sniffers.
They are making such a big deal here if someone gets caught with a joint. When driving a scooter, however, you can let people sniff your gasoline as much as these things can blow through their pipes, often straight into the face.
Are these people aware of the health-risks involved in sniffing unburned gasoline?
For example; you could smoke pot everyday for 20 and more years and still be a functioning human being. After a few years of sniffing gas, however, your brain is toast.
Besides, gasoline damages pretty much all the organs and is proven to cause cancer.
So, when will the government have the guts and step in. The technology to have them run on electricity is here, eventually with a combustion engine as a range extender.
All these scooters burning or better not burning gas at the traffic lights is mass suicide.
There’s somewhere in China where all the scooters have to be electric. I think it’s Ning Bo. It makes for better air quality but more dangerous pavements as you can’t hear them coming! But it would be a good idea for the Government to offer incentives to buy electric scooters, trade in really old ones etc.
Exactly, all the money for urban development/ renewal and the quality of life still sucks. Just getting these noisy/stinky pieces of trash banned would really increase in quality of life.
That’s pretty much everywhere in China and they are usually classified as electric bikes. But the government is clamping down on them now.
Taiwan is far behind the times in some ways. The main reason I surmise is companies such as Kymco and Sym have a lot of influence here, along with the gormlessness of the population as to the ways of the outside world.
[quote=“headhonchoII”]That’s pretty much everywhere in China and they are usually classified as electric bikes. But the government is clamping down on them now.
Taiwan is far behind the times in some ways. The main reason I surmise is companies such as Kymco and Sym have a lot of influence here, along with the gormlessness of the population as to the ways of the outside world.[/quote]
Was going to say the same. Beijing, Hangzhou, Chengdu - all have plenty of bicycles and electric scooters. It’s calming, and streets ahead of Taiwan.
But I wouldn’t expect change here in the next 20 years.
I only hate the ones that blow out these blueish clouds of exhaust gas. Every scooter in Taiwan needs to pass an exhaust test once in a while to be legally registered, how come such scooters are still on the street then? Do these masks really help to avoid breathing that stuff?
I hear you, OP. I hate them riding on the sidewalks, too, especially when I have the kids with me. Plus, they make our neighborhood a total danger zone in the mornings–hundreds, possibly thousands, of them use our little alley as a shortcut to avoid lights on the way to work. Makes the morning walk with my son to his preschool very exciting, but ridiculously dangerous. I especially love the ones who zip around the corner to go the wrong way down a one-way street, almost nailing me, my son, or our infant in his stroller on several occasions–we’ve taken to hugging the wall single file almost all the way to school.
This is one (very small) area where our life in China was somewhat more pleasant–no motorcycles, no scooters. (And no car horns allowed, but that’s another thread.)
Nothing wrong with scooters per se. Can you imagine if there were 20 million cars instead? The solution is exceedingly simple. All that needs to happen is:
They should all be electric, and charging points should be ubiquitous and cheap.
There should be an actual driving test.
There should be real policemen, and they should enforce traffic laws.
The CARS should go. Most fatal/serious accidents are caused by cars hitting scooters. Basic physics ensures that the little guy gets the worst of it.
There should be runways alongside all major roads so that pigs may take off and land in safety.
Scooters are great for Taiwan. If everyone was driving cars, things would be ten times worse in terms of pollution, safety and traffic congestion.
Scooters need to be encouraged.[/quote]
Pretty sure most Taiwanese only ride a scooter because they can’t afford or don’t want the hassle of a car. Take away 100 scooters and 90 riders are going to be busing or biking it. The other 10 might bust their balls to get a car because they believe they simply cannot survive without motorized transport.
I’d imagine a Taipei with 10% more cars and no scooters would be a great place to live - almost like a normal city.
[quote=“monkey”][quote=“Bu Lai En”]Get real.
Scooters are great for Taiwan. If everyone was driving cars, things would be ten times worse in terms of pollution, safety and traffic congestion.
Scooters need to be encouraged.[/quote]
Pretty sure most Taiwanese only ride a scooter because they can’t afford or don’t want the hassle of a car. Take away 100 scooters and 90 riders are going to be busing or biking it. The other 10 might bust their balls to get a car because they believe they simply cannot survive without motorized transport.
I’d imagine a Taipei with 10% more cars and no scooters would be a great place to live - almost like a normal city.[/quote]
I was going to say the same thing. Certainly almost all the student riders would now be taking the bus/Mrt or walking.
There is the additional benefit of making sidewalks and small lanes safer, as AmoyMama mentioned. Cars don’t drive on sidewalks to take corners faster, nor would they use small lanes as scooters do as the savings in time would be offset by the likelihood of a traffic jam from which you couldn’t extract yourself.
With safer sidewalks people would feel they were able to walk more, hence setting off a virtuous circle.
Scooters are a menace in Taiwan. No doubt about it.
Scooters are great for Taiwan. If everyone was driving cars, things would be ten times worse in terms of pollution, safety and traffic congestion.
Scooters need to be encouraged.[/quote]
That’s not true really. The people who ride scooters in urban areas should be encouraged to take public transportation (just like the car drivers should be). They take scooters because they are convenient and extremely cheap to run. It’s hard to generalise too much about scooter drivers only to say that most ride scooters because they can and not because they neccessarily need to. They could take buses/MRT/bike/walk in most cases. I’m talking about the whole range from students to workers and housewives etc.
Seriously, why do students need scooters? What’s the argument there? It’s also unhealthy.
Japan’s cities are just as crowded as are so of China’s but they do fine without scooters because they encourage public transportation.
Taiwan has the wrong policies. The same can be seen for the highway they are adding from Yangmei to Wugu. It would have been better to build a light rail line because that highway will just encourage more cars on the road and therefore more bottlenecks in urban areas off the highway and worst of all more pollution.
[quote=“monkey”][quote=“Bu Lai En”]Get real.
Scooters are great for Taiwan. If everyone was driving cars, things would be ten times worse in terms of pollution, safety and traffic congestion.
Scooters need to be encouraged.[/quote]
Pretty sure most Taiwanese only ride a scooter because they can’t afford or don’t want the hassle of a car. Take away 100 scooters and 90 riders are going to be busing or biking it. The other 10 might bust their balls to get a car because they believe they simply cannot survive without motorized transport.
I’d imagine a Taipei with 10% more cars and no scooters would be a great place to live - almost like a normal city.[/quote]
I’d guess a lot of these scooter riders also have a car somewhere. My wife and I had two scooters and a car and the car rarely left the driveway. We are down to one scooter now and it is a fight about who will get to take it to avoid the hassle of parking. Public Transport might be a little better in Taipei, but anywhere else scooters are a necessity. And if everyone had to drive their cars, I can’t imagine the gridlock.
Electric scooters are not really an option for Taiwan either, as they are not reliable in heavy rain. This coming from one of my students parents who sells them and was trying to get me to buy one.
I bet none of you have scooters. If you did, you would be complaining about cars getting in the way and people not paying attention to where they’re walking while they watch PPS on their phones. More importantly, you would be complaining about how busses always change lanes. Why can’t they just stay in the right lane?! They make a stop every 400 meters, and they keep changing lanes and pinning scooters into the curb or forcing us out into the far left lane where a car already is.
I love my piece of shit scooter, and I can’t imagine my life here without it anymore. I can go anywhere, I can PARK anywhere, I don’t wait in traffic because I can go in between the cars, there’s no traffic rule enforcement so I always make right on red and save a lot of time (think 90 second lights), and if I don’t want to wait at a light, I can hop off my scooter, walk it across the street in the crosswalk, and continue riding at the other side.
Smog, pollution, etc…not my problem. The government should make tighter controls on the exhaust of the scooters. It’s not like there’s any shortage of scooters here…remove the ones that create the most pollution and encourage more electric (high performance, not a 50cc equivalent or break in the rain) or better burning gas ones, although 100 kuai every few days (from a money standpoint) doesn’t bother me the least. I pay less than I would taking the MRT/bus everywhere. I do agree though (having lived in BJ before) that it’s scary when you almost get hit by an electric scooter you can’t hear coming up behind you. BJ also has bike lanes everywhere, which Taipei doesn’t have. I had an electric bike (not scooter) in BJ, and it was great. Just fly down the bike lane with no traffic, no problems, but Taipei doesn’t have the luxury of being a massive city where there is room for a bike lane, only a “two-lane” scooter/bike lane in some areas (like bridges, etc.).
I’m pretty sure that electric bikes can work in the rain if they are built properly, the Chinese don’t have rain .
There’s no good reason anymore for the God awful number of scooters around and as I said the main reason is because they are extremely cheap, almost free for tax, insurance and can park for free almost anywhere (this is taking away our public space that we all pay to maintain and use in our taxes). If there were scooter parks, if the things were environmentally friendly, it they didn’t make so much noise, if people drove them carefully…then there’s a place for them. The current situation is a farce.
@ Mike_ Almost everybody has or has had a scooter on here I’m betting. You and some of the others posters here make the CLASSIC mistake of equating A being oppposite to B. That’s not the way things work in the real world. I have driven scooters and cars here and still do. The problem is that it is out of control and the government has used scooters are an excuse to not invest in public transport in many places. Taipei in particular has no such excuse anymore but the politicians have no balls to really get to grips with the situation. Really and truly the best solution is to discourage their use just like most modern cities.
Do a little thought experiment and think of all the improvements that would happen if scooters disapperared for the large cities. Walkable sidewalks! Safe sidewalks and safer roads! At least 50% less noise! Less pollution too if public transport is properly used and maintained.
What would people miss, the convenience of driving in 30C humid smoggy crap or a torrential downpour and almost getting killed for the priveledge. Sucking in the filthy air? The convenience of driving door to door or getting to the convenience store 1 MINUTE faster?
Taipei has an extensive MRT and bus system that is quite cheap and very high quality by world standards. 5 million people live in the Northern area of Taiwan that do not really need to drive scooters. It also has an excellent train system along with high speed rail. People who feel the need to drive for some reason and can afford to pay for the priviledge can use cars.
When you have a family and small kids here it gets much worse, you start to think about things more. Scooters block the pavements everywhere and are a menace on the roads and the air is so polluted in Taiwan, bad for kids health.
I have a scooter and a car. When I ride the scooter, BOY! Do I hate them fucking thoughtless selfish bastards in their cars. When I’m in the car, BOY! Do I hate, them thoughtless selfish bastards on their scooters. When I’m on foot, BOY! Do I hate ALL them thoughtless selfish bastards in their cars and on their scooters.
For me, the bottom line isn’t pollution or cost. Its a full 90-minute commute each way by public transport involving at least one change of bus or bus/MRT. Or 20 minutes by car door-to-door. Its a no-brainer.
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