cyclists are #6 i would say.
anyway this whole hierarchy thing is completely backwards. having a car doesn’t make you a big man with the right the act like an asshole, the fact that this is perfectly normal behavior here just baffles me.
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Goes back to money equalling class.
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Who owns the road as a pedestrian? I do! I just walk onto the pedestrian crossing, if they hit me, they’ll pay!
Sidewalks or not, people don’t care, they just walk on the street, like they did in the 50’s and 60’s when there were less scooters and almost no cars.
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Did you lots ever see the videos from the 60s and 70s when people still rode bikes around and there were Bullock carts and yes very few motorbikes and cars.
In some ways that was a lot better.
Dumbest thing they EVER did was to use motor vehicles for everything and put massive roads for card everywhere .
Now it was necessary to a point , but copying the US in a tiny Asian nation . That was stupid .
They are getting there now but the millions of motor scooters and cars everywhere is definjtely the worst thing about living here , by far. At this stage it’s engrained in policies because a few big companies can pay millions to lobby and pay off the legislators and there are tens of thousands of people depending on fixing motor scooters for a living .
Kymco had annual sales of a billion USD last year most of it was from Taiwan. Similar with Sym. Did you ever see any documentary or write up about those companies?
Last year 1 million scooters were sold in Taiwan .
If you think about that number it’s really insane for a tiny country (20 year high due to incentive schemes).
Kymco isn’t even a public company just owned by a few rich families down South.
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#1, with a bullet, are Toyotas.
On any given drive, you are bound to see two or three moves from hell. I’ve been taking stock of these fools and inevitably, they seem to mostly drive Toyotas.
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I just now got run into on my way home from lunch. Stupid twit was on the far right slowly going through the intersection on a scooter and as I passed on the left she turned left, ran into me without looking and bounced off. I continued through, like I was taught to, and safely pulled over to go see how she was. She just bounced up, mounted her scooter and continued her left turn through lunch hour traffic to a chorus of horns and cars dodging her. No lessons learned, par for the course.
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I see plenty of elderly get plowed over by buses, trucks and scooters on the nightly news (aka “the nightly CCTV crash-a-thon”)
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I like the roads here. There, I’ve said it.
But dogs and the dog raising culture are the worst aspect of TLTW.
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the worst part of the dog-raising culture is buying one in some stupid night market and then not liking the “raising” part and then dropping it off in the mountains.
This is just one of the reasons there are so many wild dogs along the river path of Taipei and up in the hills north of the city. Feckers.
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Ever notice how there’s no little dogs in the mountains? Do the big dogs eat the little dogs? 
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toxic canine canabilism
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The little dogs probably get eaten by cockroaches.
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Is this some variation of Stockholm syndrome, where you’ve been victimized by the roads here for so many years you can’t imagine a calm and orderly traffic system that respects the rights of pedestrians? I haven’t even met one native Taiwanese who likes it.
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I think I’m just used to it here. Was back in the States a couple of months ago and felt really pressured to make sure I wasn’t breaking any laws and having to really pay attention to my speed. Here, I usually only look at my speedometer when I’m coming up on a speed camera.
But yeah, the pedestrian thing here grinds my gears. I get cars behind me honking if I stop to let a pedestrian cross when they’re waiting at a zebra crossing.
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I was taking up a contrary position for the sake of argument. Actually from this year I’ve been forcing myself to stop at pedestrian crossings to let people cross. I’ll be honest, it’s been a trying experience. A lot of pedestrians look confused when I stop. Sometimes I have to get off the scoot and lead them across. Plus there’s the added problem of other drivers carrying through the crossing.
But as I like to say, it is what it is.
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I think it’s so ridiculous people waiting for cars and scooters to pass at a pedestrian crossing with or without blinking orange light!
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When I’m on my scooter, if they’re not looking at me I’ll give them a beep of the horn and wave my hand telling them to cross. They often have that deer in the headlights look and don’t know what to do. I wave again trying to make it even more obvious and sometimes they still don’t get it until I yell at them “快點啦!” If at that point they still don’t go, I just say fuck it, I tried.
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People don’t seem to fond of using their headlights here either
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Why wear out the light? Are you crazy? 
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Save electricity is expensive…